Last summer, my two animation assistants decided it would be a great idea if I drew all of my backgrounds on paper (thanks, Reagan and Katie!). Never one to step down from a challenge (good idea??), I am now eyeballs deep in an analog process that I have not engaged with in possibly forever. I am a different draftsperson now than I was when I stopped drawing on paper for the majority of my work, and it has been really incredible to see how it feels for present-day me to wield a pencil in this context. Not sure of so many things with this project, but I am going wherever the process takes me! (Also, I lost my voice yesterday….six days before mom and I leave for Thailand!)
When Kevin and I created our Wellness class Ani-Motion, I’m not sure we were expecting our enthusiasm for the subject to be matched with such passion! What a gift it is to be able to invent ways to play and have a room full of students join in whole-heartedly. Kevin might have lost this race (badly, it appears ;)), but he and I are winning in the long run!
I could not be more proud of my students who offered up an entire weekend to a fellow student with a wish. RIT senior Zach Sheikh is battling cancer for the third time, and wanted to bring the RIT community together to create games and animation that would inspire young adults who are also facing adversity. We spent Saturday and Sunday collaborating and producing an animation that incorporated 2D and 3D assets, and the end result, while still a bit glitchy, shows what can happen when we focus our energies for good!
https://www.whec.com/top-news/rit-hosts-jam-for-hope-for-student-living-with-cancer/
SO honored to have been asked to be part of RIT MFA student Selma PeAr’s Voices which she managed to complete smack in the middle of the pandemic shutdown. Directed by Selma and also featuring Komal Ashfaq (who was also the Producer) and Lani Dobson, this film is a beautifully subversive statement about where women stand today. CT Chen was the DP, with Robert Stokes as First AC, Nolan Kearney as Second AC, Zack Stone as Gaffer, and Creighton Yanchar as Sound Mixer. Congratulations on a wonderful, RIT Honors Show-selected film, everyone!
mari jaye blanchard in Voices by Selma PeAr
Komal Ashfaq in Voices by Selma PeAr
Lani Dobson in Voices by Selma PeAr
Last month I took part in the Women in Animation #workfromhome Challenge and I managed to make a new drawing/animation for each of the thirty days. 
It was really important for me as an artist to focus on that structure during the start of the lockdown, and I believe it kept me sharp as all other structure fell away. I don’t totally know what day it is anymore, but I am working during every single one of them, and weirdly, that feels good! Today, WIA announced the winner of the challenge, as well as those of us who hung in there for all 30 prompts. Congrats, America Castillo for winning, and to my fellow thirty-day-ers for completing the challenge!
Very proud of my freshmen classes’ ability to pivot in the middle of a semester, return home, and continue working in such innovative ways! They were featured in this RIT article highlighting (only) some of their solutions to continuing their work without any of the hardware on campus!
Below are the instructions I made for them regarding DIY light tables and down-shooters, and they did the rest!
DIY Downshooter Using StopMo Studio App
During production of Swing, we anticipated and encountered early the issue of resolution for the over-fifty 2D, alpha-channel videos that needed to be playing for the entire duration of the film. There were two major bottlenecks in regards to optimization, the 2D looping animations and the 2.5 Quill animation, exported as geometry and separated frame by frame in Maya. The “weight” of these assets made playback virtually impossible on certain systems, and even after the most recent and “final” optimization for distribution, I, the director of the film still cannot play Swing on my own personal headset, which is capable of playing most other Oculus downloads.
One of the problems that we ran into was having 54 animated souls spinning around the scene for the entire five minute duration while maintaining a high level of detail. One way to tackle the problem was to create a 4k video file and use that as a texture on a cylinder. The first attempt was to squeeze the aspect ratio into a square. When attached to the cylinder, the animation had a bit of aliasing. While being at 4k, the resolution was not as high quality as we would like. Larger than 4k and the whole animation experience would make the system slow down and stutter. The next option we tried was to make a square format video but have the images in a 16:9 format to then project on the cylinder. This ended up also not having enough resolution as well. The last option that enabled the higher quality while maintaining playability was to use flipbooks. Each soul was converted into a flipbook image using GlueIt2006. In Maya, every other polygon was deleted. Then on each of the remaining faces, we applied an individual shader with a UV space of (0,1). When brought into Unreal each shader was replaced with an animated flipbook. Each image is 3600×4800. We are currently researching how to lower the resolution for lower powered machines to check the frame rate and switch automatically to give the best playability.
(Blanchard/Reisch 2020)
Ever wondered what twenty seconds of animation would look like floating around your head? Mark imported all of my Quill animation into Unreal as geometry!
Every single frame on top of one another, hanging out in space. Quite a way to see an animation!
Here’s a link to a Sketchfab experience where the Quill animation can be viewed from all sorts of angles, just like it could when I was drawing it. Eventually I want to push this concept of the line in space, because it has a lot of possibilities!
RIT Lecturer Kevin Bauer and I received a PLIG (Provost Learning Innovations Grant) in 2019 for our project “SOFA SLow-Mo”, and when we envisioned bringing students together to explore movement and record it all in slow motion, I am not entirely sure either of us saw Kevin sitting in a turtle themed kiddie pool getting yogurt poured over his head 
(in my efforts to stay environmentally friendly but also have different liquids to pour and observe fluid dynamics, I opted for eggs, flour, yogurt, milk and water…a veritable raw pancake of material!) The students who joined us for this session bounced, threw, jumped, ran and spun their way to more reference footage for their peers for years to come!
Happy to be part of this vertical video spotlight by MAGIC Spell Studios regarding how we 2D animators are considering the traditional “line” in drawing.