This was a tag from Bella back in the beginning of January, which I'm not finally getting to. (Congratulate me, friend! Two blog posts in March!) It was supposed to be a New Year's Tag, but since I'm so late, it's going to be a "2015: A Summary" tag. So whatever.


1. What was the single best thing that happened last year?

2. What was the single most challenging thing that happened?


4. What did you get really, really excited about?

5. What song/album will always remind you of 2015?
Josh Groban's STAGES CD. Especially "What I Did For Love" and "Dulcinea."


6. How did you spend your Christmas?
Epicly! (Epically?) We had Midnight Mass privately up near where we live, and we got some pretty awesome snow Christmas Eve, so we had these huge soft drifts everywhere, and there was a full moon that night, so I wished on it.
Christmas is always glorious in our house. We light the Christ Candle first thing and sing Joy to the World, and put Baby Jesus in the manger. My dad always gets a fire going and makes sausage rolls and puts down a pot of coffee, and we open stockings and eat food and drink mimosa and/or orange juice and coffee and pass out gifts and get really, really loud. We had a lot of people over that day, too. We have a friend who moved to Tahoe from Wyoming, and her brothers came for dinner, which was our traditional gnocchi and ham. We also had a snowball fight later that night, and it was pretty freakishly cold out there, which probably wasn't good for all of us with our wicked chest colds. We were all:


8. What were the best movies you saw in 2015?


9.What were the best books you read in 2015?
What Came From The Stars by Gary Schmidt; The Winner's Curse by Marie Rutkoski.

I was briefly hooked on Person Of Interest, then a female character was introduced who sort of usurped my boys, Reese and Finch, and I later discovered she was having a relationship with another female and I lost interest. I restarted 24, though. (Still adore Jack.)

11. Did you discover any new musicals?

12. Did you write any new books?
I am mostly revising books I've already written - namely, DragonFire and Fulcrum. I had been kicking around an idea concerning nightmares, and that one has really taken off this month. I've been actively writing it a few hours each night. I'm pretty excited about it. :-)

13. Did you make any new friends?

14. What was your biggest personal change from January to December of this past year?

15. Is there some change you will have to go through in 2016?
Gosh, I hope not. Well, I'd like to move. But otherwise... Gosh, I hope not.

16. What was your single biggest time waster in your life this past year?

17. What was biggest thing you learned this past year?
Life is hard, but trust in God. Worry gives you insomnia.


18. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.
"He will always hate me / No matter what I say / And there is no mistaking the love is gone."
(This is actually a man's song, so I had to change the "she" in the original lyrics to "he".)


19. What are five things you want to do in 2016?
a.) Land an agent. (That makes me sound like I'm hooking a fish. Sorry, agents!)
b.) Buy a piano and start composing music again.
c.) Go to one of the two SCBWI Annual Conferences in either LA or New York (though since I didn't get tax returns this year, that's probably not going to happen this year).
d.) Get a better job.
e.) Move.

20. Describe 2015 in your own words.


Truly, not the best year I've ever had. It had it's ups and downs, and I was mostly very worried and stressed during it. I concentrated on trying to be a bit more trusting and take it one day at a time. I sometimes felt like I was doing good with that, but then someone would say, "Are you okay? You seem sad," and I so I guess I wasn't being as brave as I'd thought I was being.

2015 did have some epic moments - Carmel and WordWave and Christmas were three incredible highlights to the year and I want to go back to check out more of the missions in the very near future. That's a definite To-Do. I also got myself submitting to agents, which is an A+ for me in regards to my courage. (Submitting to agents is scary!)

However, I seem to have grown more antisocial. The best thing in my life is going to my little home and being alone, with no people other than my sisters. And Netflix. (Seriously, guys. NETFLIX.)

And this was my relationship with last year

HERE'S TO A BETTER THIS YEAR!!! :-) 

God bless. 

The Cat

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If you didn't, you might consider getting glasses.

Yep, I changed my blog. I'm still trying to decide how I like the colours. I was getting over the dark green, so I decided pale green. Yeah, pale green was good. Then I thought, grey. Or maybe pale blue. So I'm not totally sure what colour I've ended up with here, but it's definitely not what I had before.




I haven't done much. Writing, reading, writing, reading, writing, reading. Rinse, repeat.

I do confess to a sudden huge adoration to James Blunt. Most of his songs speak to my soul. I don't recommend watching his music videos - they can be a little we'rd - but my goodness, his songs are GOOD! Here, see for yourself.

 
You should also listen to "Carry You Home" and "She Will Always Hate Me." Oh, and "Bonfire Heart." And "Postcards." And, "No Tears." Okay, I won't post anymore. I like him. :-)

Also, I have a sister who does videos. She's rather good, you know. I requested a music video to Eleven, since his catchphrase is "Geronimo" and this song is called "Geronimo." QED, this is Eleven's song. I quite loved it. But then again, Eleven (and the Ponds) are my favorite:


Oh, and I did go to this thing called WordWave. I heard tell about it by Bona Fide Books (our independent small press in Tahoe, which is cool) and it was quite a lovely event. It was three days - Friday and Sunday were both more of "events" that you had to pay for, but Saturday was a free day, so my mother, three sisters, a friend and I went on Saturday. There were some workshopping conferences (more conference than workshop, unfortunately) and booths where you could make your own simple journals, a printing press, a booksale, and agents.



Not in the booths, of course. Just, there. Offering 10-minute pitch sessions. So I did what any self-respecting writer with two books written would do. I signed up for a 10-minute session, a one-on-one pitch, if you will, with an agent from Fuse Literary (formerly Foreword Literary). It ended up being more than 10 minutes - the agents were really chill on time, which was cool - so I had more like 20-30 minutes where I pitched my story to Laurie McLean and got awesome feedback on a query and synopsis. I tell you, I haven't felt this good about a query and a synopsis since... like, ever.


So now I've changed my blog. Because, it was time to change my blog. FACELIFT, PEOPLE!!! I'm also trying to figure out what I want to do with this blog. Like, it's sort of drifting in La-la land, poor thing. It's just sitting here patiently, going, "Oh, don't mind me. I will come when you caaaaaaalll!!" Sort of like a chorus line from Les Miserables. So I guess 2016 resolutions would be:

1.)  Submit to more magazines.
2.)  Blog more.

A hesitant extra would be: 3.)  Get the keyboard in working shape and start playing music again.


And draw. That would be #4.




God bless! ~The Cat

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10 Beautifully Animated Illustrations

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Video editor Trevor Carmick is receiving all sorts of attention for his new side project called Beer Labels in Motion, a collection of beer labels cleverly animated in GIF format.

Carmick was inspired by a set of cinemagraphs that documented a brew session with Dogfish Head. Originally published by The New York Times in 2011, these animated GIFs set a new bar across the Internet. “It’s so hard to look at them and not lose track of time,” said Carmick in an interview with Cartoon Brew. But Carmick’s GIFs do more than cinemagraphs—they imagine unrealized movement, bringing a whole new dimension to a flat graphic.

Carmick’s process usually begins in a location familiar to many animation artists—the beer aisle—where a certain label will catch his eye. He then separates the beer label in Photoshop and fills in behind elements that move, a process he was first exposed to while working on Forgotten War: The Struggle for North America for Mountain Lake PBS.

Carmick is actually surprised no one had thought of animating beer labels before. “It seems like such an obvious thing to do,” he said. “I just thought it would be so cool if these labels came to life.”

To see more examples of Carmicks animated beer labels, visit his site.

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Alec Mackenzie is an artist who creates corrupted, grotesque and funny loops of low-end 3D animation and presents them as animated GIFs.

You can find Alec’s archive of these on his Tumblr BadBlueprints.tumblr.com.

Towards the earlier part of his blog, you can also see some kinetic wall installations that Alec created using black lines (possibly made of tape or painted to look blocky and computer generated). The lines animate directly on the wall with small motors and a scroll of paper.

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Reza Iman is a recent graduate of the animation program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

He produces small loops out of animation tests and posts them on his blog, alongside other drawings and character design studies, often rendered with non-traditional graphic ideas.

Reza also has a portfolio blog here and a recent reel on Vimeo.

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Andrew Ohlmann draws and animates often with digital tools. Andrew sometimes uses filters, software functions and programs to partially generate the visual patterns, mirrored drawings and degenerated lines in his work.

In the following animated loop titled “bad party”, Andrew successfully captures the spinning that often immediately precedes a vomiting session:

More drawings and animated loops can be found on Andrew’s blog and website.

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Stephen Vuillemin is an artist who graduated from Gobelins in 2008 and lives in London.

You can see Stephen’s portfolio and blog here which includes his GIF animated comics.

Stephen has elevated the art of the animated GIF by producing work specifically for that format, and subsequently, has been commissioned by art directors to create animated GIFs to run in online publications. When the same publications run static print versions of the GIF illustrations, Stephen’s work flops the paradigm: the print version is the modified, adapted, and even inferior version when compared to the animated online version–but only because it lacks the motion. Stephen’s static illustrations are equally strange, humorous and appealing to view.

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Opinions on animated GIFs range from pure hatred to unabashed overuse. “Hide your eyes,” wrote one reporter on CNET. Meanwhile, Tumblr, which is the undisputed platform for animated GIF enthusiasts, announced it has reached over 100 million blogs. Now that Google has released a new search tool for these dynamic images, some wonder if we’ve reached peak GIF.

We may be experiencing the second incarnation of animated GIFs, a 25-year-old medium, but it feels totally different this time. More than just dancing babies and glittery hearts, animated GIFs now have the potential to evoke a whole new narrative depth. They can be distractingly anarchic or subtly creepy. They can also strike a balance between these two, offering a small, yet thoughtful charge of emotion. Alastair Macaulay’s homage to the State of Liberty in The New York Times was illustrated with three animated GIFs, each with calming, subtle looping movement—the rolling waves of the New York Harbor, a bird soaring past Lady Liberty, and the swaying branches of the trees on Ellis Island. Why aren’t all newspaper articles illustrated so dynamically?

Whether or not the revival of the animated GIF is a fleeting trend, they present an opportunity for animators and the community-at-large. Vine, which is Twitter’s answer to the animated GIF, is quickly becoming a teachable moment. “Vine is a wonderful thing,” wrote Daniel Stuckey on Motherboard. “It’s teaching the mainstream how to loop.”

On an obvious level, animated GIFs are a simple, lo-fi educational tool for teaching loop cycles. But I think they could yield far greater potential; animated GIFs could be to up-and-coming animators as ACEOs are to illustrators, painters and print makers— highly collectible miniature works of art that are traded and sold. I could also see an increase in animators taking commissions to create customized GIFs for avid fans.

Now that apps and software have foolproofed the GIF-making process, many have begun to experiment in wholly refreshing ways. Animators like Polly Dedman are creating animated GIFs unlike any I’ve seen before (see above). Major events, such as elections and award ceremonies, are being live GIFfed. Even Hollywood is exploring how animated GIFs can effectively promote feature length films by making them available as collectible downloads. The GIF is here to stay. So how can the animation community stake its claim in this rapidly evolving narrative medium?

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These updated and animated archival photos are made by Kevin Weir over at Flux Machine. They remind me of Terry Gilliam’s animations for Monty Python, with a bit of the bizarre spookiness of Travis Louie.

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This is me sitting in the theater with my pop and popcorn;

This is me waiting for the 157th preview to end:

This is me when Katniss volunteers to take Prim's place in the games:

This is me reacting to Effie Trinket:

This is me when the Mutts jump out of the woods:

This is me when the gamekeepers yell "STOP" to keep the remaining tributes from eating the berries:

This is me when Cato dies:

This is me when the final credits started rolling:
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