Dog Days Are Over (For Now)

Funny how time passes just like that. Life, indeed, passes in a fast pace too. Faster than you can imagine. Looking back, I have come quite far, or at least that's what I kept telling myself. But then I look into the mirror, tryna think again, what did I achieve thus far? I felt like a loser. Haha. But well, we all are working our way there. Soon.

Niña

My final project for experimental animation. I love cutting papers. LOL. Just incase you wanna go like, its the same kite lo.. building moving.. blah blah blah, I just want you to know its stop-motion animation and there were at least 600 frames there.








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Ball Bouncing

I got a pretty score for this homework.



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FML

this is not what I'm gonna submit. REDO~ anyway comment comment please.. Add what/ improve where? I need a lot of suggestions now..








Not even close to complete

Happy

I was reading an article today about Happiness & Joy. A line caught my eyes real deep:

We learn new things everyday. We learn to be stressed. We learn to be happy. Day by day, if we kept learning to stress, we get better in stressing ourselves; Same goes to happy. So, why are we learning stress instead?

I know things are always easier to be said than done. But, I guess, happiness don't just come by one day and say hello to you. You gotta make yourself happy at the first place. I am in the process of learning that. Need no to be upset for life. Shit things happen everyday. Looking for something to be happy about? Look outside from the window pane, breath-in, fresh air can makes one happy too. Just don't take things for granted. Appreciate every little things, be thankful.

And too from today onwards, I wanna learn another thing - honesty. Apparently real friends tell the truth; so if I think you are ugly I will have no problem telling you that to your face. So be offended and just leave cause you cannot accept the reality that you're ugly. Go find someone else who is willing to lie straight to your face that you are cute. I'm not that kinda liar. Not anymore. You are ugly. 'Nuff said.

(p/s: Im laughing to myself watching 'cater2u' video. Aww)

Most Expensive Experience (To Date)

It all started with a very lovely morning, I went to class as usual early morning and everything seemed so perfectly fine. Things started to get weird when I got to the class and there were just four of us there. And we wait, and waited; Apparently my teacher had something going on so he was late and we were free to go (according to the school policy or something). My original plan was to go and pick up my film after class but that was too early to get to the lab post since the class ended early. My pal Jana suggested that she fetch me home and we get some rest and she will come and pick me up again in the noon so we can both go to pick up the film later.

This is where the expensive experience comes in: We went into the post lab for about 20 minutes and came back with her car went missing! WTF!? Apparently she parked her car at the street that has time restriction for parking - you know, you are only allowed to park there for certain time. So her car got towed. In just 20 minutes. Holy shit I know.

So she made a few calls locating her car blah blah blah and she found it through the phone - it's somewhere 2 miles away. So we walked there and checked in to get the car. Guess how much she was charged for to claim back the car? $430 dollars!! Insanely crazy~ Reason #43212 not to drive in the City!!!

To add salt to the wound, when she got back the car, there was a ticket (saman) for her too! So pointless! Add that overall she paid about 500 dollar just to get back the damn car. Ughh! I felt terribly bad for her. And awful. And guilty. Ok, words can't really describe how I felt. Its horrible.

I don't know what I can do but I hope she gets better. Maybe I'm gonna buy her a coke. A coke coke not cocaine. LOL

Smoking Time

Woo~ I figured the title already freaked all of you out. No worries, I am not a smoker yet. Well as you all may already know that I am currently busy on my finals and stuffs. I've been working in the lab for the past few days now and I finally realized why most of the animators I knew before smoke like there is no tomorrow.

So here's the thing about doing animation work - apparently a good animator only animates 2 seconds of video a day. Well not in my case but that too explain why my works are a bit choppy at times cause I do 10 seconds or more a day. That leads to why animator needs to smoke. It's like you've been working on this piece of 'art' for more than 3 hours and you ain't seeing anything more than 1 second on the screen. It is so frustrating and at the same time you felt like your time is running faster than it should be due to the fact you're animating 24 frames per second. Breaking that down will be like - you're drawing 24 pieces of pictures for a second of animation. Not that bad right? It is bad.

So for any normal human it is only right to take a break from working on what you're working on if you think its not gonna go anywhere further - as for animators, we (they) go for smoking. LOL. You know, chilling out. Well in my case, I'll just go to facebook and chat and whatever. It makes me feel slightly relief talking to people (if there are people online and bother to reply me) and refresh my mind a bit. Then I regain my energy to continue. I think that is how animators go for smoking before they discover Facebook. But too bad they are already hooked up to smoking. LOL

Haha.'Nuff with the breakdown of why animators smoke shit. I shall just continue my work and hopefully I will post it later tonight if I can finish something up today.

(UPDATE: Her name is Niña.)

Pacca (for now)

Holy smoke I have no idea what I signed up for till I checked my schedule and realized I am this close to the end of the semester! I am a bit regret for promising my friend to help her on her shoot because I realized I don't really have time for her whole i-am-a-serious-director thing. I don't mind spending one or two hours to film for her but she needs me for 2 days at least. Geez. I felt like a movie star already! Thankfully for my case, I shot mine today for about 4 hours and hopefully it will turn out good (I'm shooting with analog camera - can't tell the result till the film get processed after a week plus. SO gun jiong!)

And then I have to start focusing on my long-on-hiatus animation homework, well, not really on hiatus, just the work is not that good to a level where I don't feel like sharing and it did has a worse grade than those before. So whatever, I'm just gonna stay focus on my final cause the homework is only 5% compared to the 48.33% for final project from overall grade. Ugh.

Another good thing happening now is that my drawing is improving. I just joined the winter show for freshmen with one of my still life drawing, hopefully it makes the cut and win me some cash. *fingercrossed* I thought of joining the spring show with my puppet too but I don't think I can find enough time to sew AND fix everything AND animate it AND make sure its grade A++ kinda work to be eligible to participate. So I'll put that aside till I get my final done.

Basically that is all I am doing now and I won't be back to the blog since its already dying due to the lack of readers till I get most of my works done. I might blog photos of my progress once in a while (hopefully) to update everyone about what's going on here. Till then, its pacca (poka/pakka) for now.

(p/s: the cafe is playing Dido's "Thank You". Love love love that song!)

EggTarts

You might not believe this but San Francisco has no egg tarts. What?! I know. That's because I don't visit Chinatown it's too far and dirty and no munfa.. So I decided to bake myself egg tarts. And I did it!

Fresh from oven

It's a bit out of shape but I think it's really not that bad for first timer. Plus, the taste was really good. Like a tart.

Black Friday Sales

The long anticipated Black Friday Sales was finally here! Ugh.

So I started my shopping as early as 3 in the morning. Trust me, I am not the earliest. By the time I got myself into an Old Navy store, the queue was already 'tangling' around the store, every level for each departments. Ugh. So I figured maybe I can spend some time here queuing for a 15dollar pair of jeans since I was gonna meet with my friends by 6 after that. I ended up queued for an hour and half for a pair of jeans plus some boxers and undies. Totally worth it. LOL.

Holy shit crowded! 

Have you seen aggressive male shoppers? Tons here!

 After that I went to browse in other stores like H&M and Gap. The line was crazy. I don't even feel like going in because its just too many people there.

Super long queue: The store was not even opened yet.

Gap (but no gap in the line)

It's almost 6 by the time I was done cursing over the store that lied about 50% on all sales. I wanted to get the damn book so badly but it was way too expensive. So I went right away to the Westfield Mall to meet up with my friends Sarah and Daniel.

Westfield  Mall when it opened.

H&M

Tik Tok tik tok.. it was about 9-ish soon after my friends done their shopping at Old Navy (too). We thought we were gonna pass out anytime soon if we didn't get our breakfast, so we headed to Denny's which is located just around the corner. Aww. I love breakfast.

Breakfast at Denny's

 And then we kept going on with other stores Adidas, Superdry, Quicksilver, Hollister, A&F, Vans, Borders, Nike ... till 11 plus. So effing exhausted~ we just dismissed from then since everyone was getting tired.

It was such a fun shopping day. Ironically we all wanted to get some computer stuffs but we realized there aren't any computer hardware stores in the town at all! (or so we thought.) Well I didn't really get myself a lot of stuffs because I can hardly breath due to overcrowd mostly everywhere near the major shopping attractions. I'm glad we didn't visit any Walmart or BestBuy because I heard its worse in terms of the crowd and queue. Haha. Definitely a very good experience.

Walmart (from google)

Weekend Before Thanksgiving (Part Deux)

We walked home right after the movie. Along the way, we passed by H&M and it was a long queue outside the store - everyone started to queue for the Lanvin @H&M launch! It's insane. (When I told my sister about the launch she asked me to queue too! LOL)

The reason people are queueing: 9.98USD for an evening dress! 

I had never seen crowd queueing for a launch before but I knew it's equally crazy back in Malaysia. (Yes, I'm talking about the recently opened Uniqlo store) I think this is rather the same but it was colder here, like freezing cold. It was about 7°C at that time. I picture this is how it's gonna be for me next week when I'm gonna go camping for the Black Friday Sales. Ugh. I'm so excited!

The wet + coldness in late night San Francisco

Ok. Fun time is almost over. I shall get back to my homework and make-it-work. LOL

Weekend Before Thanksgiving

As I mentioned on the earlier post before, I am having my finals now. Works have been going good, hopefully everything will turn out great. And as for today I finally get a chance to visit the cinema with friends a friend, Chelsea, for Harry Potter (XD) We've been talking about it since last week and it finally opened yesterday. Ugh. I was so excited.

The movie was not bad but we both think its a bit too long. It kinda lack of a more dynamic climax I would say, but nonetheless it didn't really disappoint much. *Spoiler ahead* The 'best' part was when Harry and Hermionie were making out. Chelsea: "it felt so wrong, like, watching video game porn." I felt so awkward because Hermionie was like the biggest prune ever but she was doing all the tongue twisting and shits like that. Totally got me shivered. Ugh. Bluekk.

I tried dressing up ala Harry Potter for the movie. Ha

Powell St. after 11pm

Not a movie that I'm gonna watch again and again. Nevertheless it was entertaining. The animation part was COOL. They had a segment with only animation and .. you should check it out. It's nice.

As for the remaining of my weekend I will stay home and do my puppet and still life drawing. Hopefully every homework can be done by Wednesday so that I can enjoy my Thanksgiving weekend. Aww.. and Black Friday sales.



to be continued... (blogger on strike.. getting a long deserved sleep)

Cinematic Storytelling

Time flies! (If you are my regular readers you'll realized how often I say that) I am on my finals already. WTF! So many things I wanna do but this time, I actually have a lot of time to make'em happen unlike back in... Long story short - I have 2 animations due for final, a short movie/clip and etc. I'm so excited! I'm most excited about the cinematic storytelling class final project because I love to shoot video and its fun. I have yet to come up with an idea of what to do but I'm sure I'll figure out soon. Below are some pictures from my homework - we need to recreate a scene from a movie of our choice. Mine is, of course, 500 Days of Summer.

If you know that movie enough you will realize the photos above look nothing like the original. Haha. That's because its not. These are some random shots I took for fun. Enjoy.

(p/s: I can't thank Leo and Chelsea enough to help me out on this one. My life savers!)

Laundry

First laundry since I moved out. Hell lots of clothes! I really like the laundry system in the state. You know, laundry shops open 24/7, bring in your clothes, your dryer sheets, your detergent.. and so on. Put in the coins and wait for 20 minutes and you're set to go. So cool.

(P/s: Yes, I am such a lazy person that I don't even do my own laundry a.k.a. handwash)

Judge/ Be Judged

Who are we to judge one's right or wrong? If knowing that, voicing your opinion is gonna hurt someone, will you still do it? Why? Are you gonna justify yourself by saying, because true friends always tell the truth? What makes your opinion the truth then? Do you even know what was the truth?

The truth is - it's a mad world we are living in. Shit things happened. The only one who knows the truth are God and ourselves. There is no reason for us to judge others life.

If a friend tell you, he has been drunk and high for half his life; Are you gonna tell him go to hell?

If a friend tell you, he is gay; Are you gonna tell him you're sorry and make him your enemy?

If a friend tell you, he is muslim/ jews/ buddhist/ christian; Are you gonna stop praying for him or wish him well?

Most of the time we think we know what is wrong. Not only we think it is wrong, we think everyone should agree that it is wrong. Why? I think its time for everyone to stop judging one's life. Life is too short to keep an eye on everyone else's. Just follow our intuition and do what we think is right for us. Don't be afraid of getting judged because the people around us are not gonna be there to see things happen. We are in the same learning process, just different path, going through different experiences. We will eventually be in the same place.

(p/s: I might sound like an effing hypocrite by posting this because I do judge people too. I admit. I am learning not to. It's a long process.)

My Favorite Part of My New Room Is..

... the closet. Like I never felt as organized as this with my clothes before.

And yes, I don't remember me bringing that much of clothes too. But I did. I felt so happy they are finally all out from the luggages and breath the fresh air out here. Poor thing they were all stuck in the box previously due to some space restriction reasons. I felt like bitching about it now but I'm just gonna go to sleep. TIRED.

Lovely Wednesday

I think I am a little late to blog about the Giants victory! But well, its better to be late than never. There was a parade today to celebrate the winning team of San Francisco. It was a bit intense and chaos at the city as everyone was there to support their beloved baseball team. It was orange and black everywhere.

The event was so huge that it affected the traffic around downtown. I wasn't able to get on any shuttle buses from the school as everyone was stuck everywhere. ThankGod I have no class today or else I'm pretty sure I won't make it on time/ to class. Also in the afternoon, I went for an outing homework that required me to recreate a scene for a movie of my choice. Photos to be uploaded soon. Thanks Chelsea and Leo for helping me out. Appreciate that.

Today also marked the last day I will be staying over with my mum's friend. Therefore, I treated them dinner at a nearby chinese restaurant. I am really excited sad that I have to leave this soon because they were being really nice to me all these while.

More updates on tomorrow. Tired and sleepy now. Pacca.

Rainbow After The Storm

I swear to You-Know-Who I was this close to give up my dreams last week as everything doesn't go well or as hell. Literally EVERYTHING. I wanna go home so badly. Depressed gao gao. *I am stealing a quote from Pau Pau:*

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

Thomas A. Edison

ThankGod I hang in here for awhile longer. I got my exam result paper today. Guess what? Its 100%! WTF! I don't remember the last time I got a 100%! And most of my midterms grades are out today too! 3 out of 4 subjects are A-/A/A+, with only 1 exceptional C+, stupid Analysis of Form class, which by the way, according to the teacher, is the average score he gave to the students in class. If I work my way harder, I would get a B eventually. Or so I hope.

100% !! 

And then comes to me moving out soon. Its so happy and exciting sad that I am leaving my family friends here. I wish them nothing but all well in the future, sincerely. I think my next post is either gonna be my muppet making process or the moving out day. Till then, PACCA.

(p/s: I'm getting used to my new name - Mint.)

Growing Up

This is something funny because just today itself, a lab tech couldn't find my ID/IC when I checked out from the lab today because he had a hard time finding an ID photo that is identical to me. WTF! I thought I just grew some mustache and beard compared to the clean shaved me in the IC photo! And then YewCheong showed me a pic of mine taken years back then. Holy smoke! I don't remember looking so young!

Maybe a year or two ago? or three? 

Yesterday.

Time is flying fucking fast I don't even realize it. Sigh.

Lipsync Project

I took hours to get this done. Not to mention the redo part. So please enjoy it.

Un-wess Y-oo AH Shh-Kawed (Unless You Are Scared)

My final setting for the lipsync animation. Woohoo~ I've already finished the homework but I think I will redo it. So I'm not gonna upload anything just yet. Hopefully I have enough time on Tuesday before class to remake a new one. ^^

Finding My Feet

My mum just called me earlier to tell me stop stressing myself out for homework. Haha. So, I'm telling her, here again, that I am having a fun time doing my homework. It's tiring and I got home pretty late for the past couple few days, but, I enjoyed it. So no worries. Even though I'm working against the clock to catch up with the new environment and coping with studies, its OKAY here. I am fine.

(p/s: I'm having this 爱赢才会拼 mode on for my homework now.)

Photography on Hiatus

This is gonna be a sad news for those who just drop by and see the photos and skip the reading because my beloved Nik has gone for a long deserved holiday. I can't help but to send him in for service because I'm getting a lot of dusts and weird 'bulu-bulu' (I swear its not mine) in my photos and I had to edit them out in photoshop one by one. So I brought him to a camera shop and they agreed to help me with a reasonable price. So yea, no artistic photos for the upcoming two weeks.

Nik

Meanwhile, I'm dying to get two of my animation homework done. I might be able to upload it as soon as this weekend if I can complete them both by Friday. Till then, CIAO. ^^

My "Fanshu" in the making.

Gonna do a lip sync animation with this fella. Imma named it Patrick.

Back To December

Taylor Swift - Back to December

(We've decided to redo our homework and didn't present it. Sigh.)

Best Team Ever

I don't care what is the result for this assignment (for now) but I surely think I had the best team ever with me. Period. Thank you guys so much for being so patient with me (I was late for an hour+). Assignment to be uploaded (if it's not totally screwed.)

My free lunch: Chicken Tender + Fries (I am loving the 'monthly meal plan'. Haha)