Good News Everyone!

To be read in the stylings of Futurama's Professor Farnsworth...

Good news everyone! After painfully observing the approximate ten months of elapsed time my counterpart and I have been biologically separated due to phenomenal natures of profession, I am delighted to report a permanent dimensional union which will occur in an estimated 229 hours and 13 minutes at coordinates 40°22′51″N 74°32′37″W. Please note that the distinct cause of this impending equilibrium is to be credited to my counterpart who has secured an unprecedented but significant transition into an alternative engineering classification, and also to myself after securing a correlating intermediate habitat between our respective diurnal endeavors. Prognosis, booyah!

Translation:

The news we've been waiting for: After 10 months married but living apart due to our jobs, Naveen and I are finally going to be living together again under the same roof in central New Jersey starting next Friday. Thanks to hard work and dedicated job searching, Naveen will be continuing as a game programmer for a new company called Megatouch Games (a division of AMI Entertainment) while I continue working as a character animator for Speakeasy FX. We're going to split the distance between Philly and Westfield so that neither commute is too bad, and if all goes well in the next two months for my company (in that, we secure further work from Sesame Workshop or an additional client), perhaps I could even afford a car. For now, Naveen will most likely take the van to work and I will take a train.

Today was crucial because after only a two-day search, lots of mileage on a rental car, and never enough iced coffee from Starbucks, we signed the lease for our new apartment and also finalized our moving truck reservation next Wednesday. We plan to spend Friday packing, Saturday (the 4th) with my family in Wisconsin, Sunday through Tuesday finishing packing, and finally loading the truck and heading to the east coast. It's hardly what we thought we'd be doing a year ago, but much in our lives has evolved and we've begun to roll with the changes and jump at the opportunities that mean most to us. Still, we could not do it without the constant support of our family and friends, and we thank you for cheering us on and offering helping hands, sympathetic ears, among all else and your love.

Warm regards,

Laura (and Naveen)

PS, some spanking new images hot off the press...













We'll be home soon!

Cannonball... Less Ouch... and Up!

So the good news is, I don't COMPLETELY suck. :-)

I jumped back into Maya tonight, just for a half hour, trying to reacquaintance myself with the AM character Bishop. As mentioned in an earlier post, after 8+ months of working in XSI with a different character setup, I felt like a total noob coming back into my old workflow. But, 30 minutes got me this catcher's type pose, not great but much better than the confused looking soul that was staring at me last time.



I'm getting slightly faster at navigation and don't anticipate that to be a major problem. Frankly though, I have fallen in love with XSI shortcuts. I really never bothered with shortcuts before because I used to pride myself on just being able to do the posing and animation without getting too hungup on software specifics. Professionally, though, that concept didn't last long, because shortcuts are just so helpful and efficient. So it's taking some getting used to.

One thing I had completely forgotten about is channel box animation. We don't have much of that with our rigs at work - our characters simply have controls on everything you'd ever want to possibly move. There are some channel type controls but mostly they are for toggling visibility or IK/FK and the like. I forgot how much AM rigs provide as far as inside the channel box. However, the one thing I'd like to do is be able to scroll through the min/max limits on each control and I've forgotten how to do that. Another night.

Consistent complaints: I really do need to improve my workspace. Probably the easiest thing to upgrade would be my mouse, which is still a little stiff on middle-mousing, which is very limiting. I would love Love LOVE to have a second/bigger monitor and be working on a desktop. Animating on a laptop is something I used to do fine, but now that I've been spoiled at work a with bigger better setup, it is truly hard to return to my former groove.

Improvements: I re-familiarized myself with how to pose Bishop in Maya and set keys on the control curves. I have yet to learn if I can animate within a character set too, or if such a thing is even set up for Bishop. If not, oh well. I'm just going to have to remind myself to set all the various character keys that I'm currently accustomed to automatic keying during blocking. That was a mouthful, but at least I know what I mean.

And now for my fangirl update...



Up was phenomenal. Truly amazing and deserves its own post later. It could possibly be my favorite Pixar movie, with a couple of iffy spots (whereas I am still completely in love with Finding Nemo). And Wall-E. And Ratatouille. Okay, don't get me started, it's REALLY hard to choose. ;) Up did have some very different character arcs, a couple of which had me scratching my head a bit (and I found out that my boss' young kids were actually a bit scared during the end, for good reason). But I will say that it really offered me some perspective on my current situation, reminding me to take life as the adventure it truly is, and when one chapter closes, be willing to open a new one. Terrific storytelling, as always. Bravo, Pixar.

More later.. Good night.

If Facebook Disappeared...

If Facebook Disappeared...

...would it mean the end of the world?



I think it would be the end of the world for some people. True, for some folks, Facebook is just a website, and there might be many more important ones out there, like CNN, YouTube, Google, Wikipedia, or even YTMND. For some, Facebook is just a site you can slap your name on and say, oh sure, I have an account, but I'm never on there, it's just for fun.

I realized tonight how important Facebook has become for me while living alone and away from my friends and family. What started as a networking tool among college friends has grown into this massive universe of status updates, quirky applications, and shared links and photos. If all this were suddenly to disappear, if Facebook were to close its online doors, so to speak, I think we'd have an uprising. It would be an uprising of the Bored, the Lonely, and the Networking Communicators. And that's scary.

First, you've got these tightly wound communicators, who would be the brains of the uprising operation. They'd be the ones driven completely mad over it. They would plot and scheme and judge, and they'd network with all their fellow networkers to decide what sort of action to take out.

Then, you've got the lonely people - the people who crave constant contact - and they'd be the ones that the communicators would use (I mean, talk to, lovingly, maybe over a cup of coffee and some hugs). The lonely people would desparately relay the communicators' plans and instructions to others, so that they would be less lonely. These "others" - well, they're the bored people.

Now the bored people are the ones that carry out the action. They're the most unpredictable, because if you could predict their actions, it would have meant they were a structured, disciplined species with a plan unfolding in their lives. But they're BORED people. It's a whole subclass of folks willing to display indecent behavior in public, stick anything in any orifice, experiment with anything for no real scientific or curious purpose, and take on the dares of more contemplating folks who are too guarded themselves to act in such ways. The Bored People are the ones to fear, but arguably not so much as those Communicators with the plans in hand. Still, all these people as a collective would rise up and do something terrible, for sure, if Facebook ever simply disappeared.

I'm pretty sure I'm a Communicator, so, ye know. Look out, for me.

Cannonball!!!...Ouch!!!

I'm laughing quite hard right now.

I made a deal with myself today that if I got those peanut butter cookies at the store, I'd have to do some extra animating at home. Or at least start a new side project. So I did. Never mind that the cookies pretty well sucked. I had already made the deal, so, poo.

Yes. Poo.

Anyway, I gathered some audio clips I've been harvesting lately, decided on one, and started drawing thumbnails. Fun. And then, I launched Maya...

HOLY MOLY I'm rusty. At first, it was just weird opening something that wasn't XSI, which I've been using exclusively for the last 8 months. Prior to that I had only really ever used Maya (except for maybe a year of 3d Studio Max in there somewhere), and had been completely comfortable with Maya. Suddenly tonight I found myself severely out of touch, finding I'd have to retrain my fingers again to the different keyboard shortcuts, and realizing exactly how much my workflow has changed (for the better) over the past year.

One thing I believe I'll have to change before the week is over is a new mouse. I didn't realize until now how the pressing function on my middle mouse wheel is so inefficient. Another thing I'm coping with is a single 17" laptop monitor versus dual 19" Dell monitors at work, which I use to spread out all of my tools, like the object view which I use to see the official shot camera view at all times, as well as the animation (graph) editor and often my explorer (or outliner). Even my vocabulary is XSI friendly now as opposed to the Maya terminology.

Another readjustment for progress... let's hope. For now, Bishop (the AM character) looks as stumped as I am.




Until tomorrow...

The World Is Just This Place Where We Live

A mere collection of thoughts for the weekend.

Here I am, in New Jersey, probably one of the last places I thought I'd ever live. Here I am, working my dream job, "dream job Plus", if you will, considering I'm doing what I love to do and working on a project so meaningful to me and others who grew up with Sesame Street for the last 40 years. Here I am, a married woman, lucky to have found her soul's complement, and while we're apart I am scared to death of anything happening to him while I'm away. I'm so protective, and yet I have a freer spirit somewhere. I know that change is in the wind and I can feel us getting closer to something.

We will miss it, in Chicago. We will miss our beautiful apartment I worked so hard to find, and he worked so hard to afford and maintain while I've been away. We will miss what could have been our first home, and what a fortunate one. We will miss the east windows and the fireplace we never got to use, the master bedroom we never got to move into. We will miss a handful of local ethnic restaurants where we've gotten to know the owners and become like friends. We will miss living so near to our families who mean so very much to us.

We look forward to moving toward a new, true, married lifestyle. We don't know where it will take us, but we are so blessed to know it is there. We may finally be extracted fully from the midwest, to one coast or another, where we both can find suitable work for ourselves. We have our passions to follow, and we have our passion for each other. We're ready for the new chapter, to turn the page and find ourselves happily in each other's arms, while proudly working in professions we've worked hard for our whole lives. We're proud of the many shades of discipline we've exemplified in our relationship, and we know it will carry us through time. We are so very fortunate to have seen so much of the world, and to have lived in some very special places, and we look forward to the next place which we will make special for ourselves and hopefully for others. We are preparing.

I've had quite a weekend, and yet, simple peace and quiet, nothing much to write about. Meandering observations, this time. Infinite thought and potential from such a finite mass of biological wonder. So many books, so many theories, so many walks of life. Such range of emotion, such depth of personality and mentality in the world. So vast and yet so tangible is this planet on which we live. I used to dream about flying. The rule was, I had to lie belly-side down on the sidewalk (much like the one right in front of my childhood home) and raise my head, arms, and feet above the pavement, and I would begin to hover, and lift, and rise above my neighborhood, and in a blink I was sailing through rainforests or careening high in the air amidst the tallest skyscrapers of an imagined city. But lately, sleep just brings me snapshots of the things I want most.. to be near to my husband again, and my family, and somehow still be as lucky to work on such a fantastic project as I am right now. What more could I possibly want, if all that was reality? Sometimes I let my emotions get to me, and I feel cheated out of the life we thought we might have at this point. But truly, I know I'm not cheated of anything. I'm chasing after heaven, fighting for perfection. Who knew I could be so selfish! And yet, what else would I do with my time?