stargirl
an alien leaves her fluid world for a rigid, earthly one. 24-page comic
almost two years ago, i was drawing random stuff and drew this character with a star-shaped eye. i don't know why, but i became really attached to her...the star eye felt like a good defining characteristic, both simple and attractive. the image of this character stuck with me ever since, but i never really knew what to do with it until i read sergei eisenstein's essay on disney. in it, he pulls out the essential thread of disney animation, calling it "transformation" -- from big to small (alice), from woman to man (mulan), from solid to fluid (mickey and others). he names an impulse that i had also recognized, even strived to incorporate, but had not yet conceptualized. i started to understand what i had liked about my star-eyed character. even in 2024 i had sensed her transformative potential...
i recently wrote about the loose lines in "samuel", the idea that rough lines preserve a certain humanness without being distracting if done consistently. in order to preserve the spontaneity of my sketches in the finished comic, i consciously avoided meticulous scheduling, storyboarding, cleaning up...essentially, asserting too much control over the story too soon, instead letting it develop "autonomously". this may be an abstract way of thinking, but i kept recalling heidegger's philosophy of clearing and gathering while considering how i should approach this project. i thought, in heidegger fashion, i could "clear" by first dumping whatever odd images i had in my brain onto paper, resisting the urge to deem anything too weird, too "inappropriate", too cliche, too contrived, whatever...internal metersticks i measure my work against. once i got to a certain degree of bored, i could move on and begin gathering.
in the gathering stage, i took a blue pen to my sketches and drew boxes around each comic idea. my go-with-the-flow approach alleviated a lot of anxiety, but it left me with some pretty incomprehensible drawings. in my annotations, i was less so organizing my drawings as i was organizing my thoughts, clarifying what i had already created to myself. i even discovered, so to speak, drawings buried under drawings that i had basically forgotten about. i still did not attempt at this stage to put anything in order, but instead began as soon as possible redrawing the ideas i felt excited about without knowing exactly where i was heading.
i used a pencil to draw lines of action, rough out the page layout, and make guidelines, but the drawings that mattered were basically done straight with black pen on paper. i expected every line to be final as i drew it. this mindset helped me focus on drawing energetically, as opposed to copying preexisting lines which could cost me the initial impulse behind my ideas. the downside of not being able to erase, though, is a heavy reliance on white-out and scrap paper. if i made a mistake, i often redrew that part completely. here are a few discarded drafts that were redrawn for the final comic:
for about a week, i was drawing around 2-5 pages a day. after i had finalized all of my favorite ideas, i could begin thinking about how to arrange the pages. i roughly planned out the book layout on the back of the front cover of my sketchbook and continuously revised it.
having the layout, i could start filling in logical gaps: for example, how can i get from "jail" to "princess" in an even number of pages? these fill-in drawings ran the risk of feeling forced, so i tried to go back to what was left of my thumbnails as much as possible. the "girl" page was one such fill-in, in this case between the theme of femininity set off by "curvy in every way", and the start of "princess". after some searching, i was able to rely on a page of idols i had thumbed, which happened to be relevant, as a starting point.
actually, this was an interesting phenomenon i observed. there were multiple cases where i created continuity across pages without meaning to, despite having arrived at the final book in a completely fragmented way. one example is the black square in "abstraction" that miraculously follows stargirl to the "q&a" page, and again to the "coming" page. a throughline between observing the picture of a black square in a museum, to copying the picture when asked for a drawing of earth, to leaving earth, i created mostly by accident. well, it was unintentional when i drew "abstraction" and "q&a"; i noticed it while reviewing my work and folded it into "coming", the last page i worked on.
the rest of the process was basically scanning everything from my sketchbook, importing, masking some artifacts of white-out/tape in photoshop, importing, respacing panels for clarity in indesign, playing with the letter arrangement of the cover, scanning again, reimporting. this final stage of assemblage took about two afternoons.
this was the most liberating project i've worked on for a while. there were basically no points where i felt forced to force the story -- the most frustrating moment was working with nyu shanghai's scanner, which periodically coughed out a half-baked scan due to limited memory. but even that frustration was comparable to running out of toilet paper or something, it was really nothing. almost every drawing i threw down at the start made its way into the final in one way or another, in image or in essence, even if it was just a random detail. i set out with the goal of "loose and expressive", to not pretty stuff up for any reason besides clarity, to not draw legs on the snake. despite all odds (i.e. perfectionism, anxiety), i feel like i succeeded in creating something loose but finished, and i am happy with the result.
5_2_26 0:49 shanghai5_3_26 3:24 shanghai - added zine-ification part ∗
samuel
i was surprised to see that samuel had been adapted for netflix. i remember seeing a clip of it, maybe on catsuka? after some festival last year, and not being able to find it online. i'm very grateful it was translated, very loyally too, and i was able to watch it.
the motivation behind samuel is very interesting to me. with look back and samuel both releasing last year, i'm noticing a trend of bypassing the clean-up stage in animation, resulting in deliberately "human" lines. at the end of look back the director talks about his intention of highlighting artists' labor, but i think keeping lines rough also serves to make them more childlike, which works for a story that is in many ways about the feelings of children. but look back, except for a few sequences, mostly maintains an objective depiction of reality...in this way, samuel pushes the idea of roughness further, where not only the quality of line, but its thickness, shape--even whether a line is present or not--is subject to samuel's memory.
this kind of subjective line is something i've been experimenting with in comics, but to be honest, i didn't believe it could be done in animation without making everything look choppy. i assumed that rough lines tend to break continuity, thereby breaking immersion. after watching samuel, i realized that inconsistency isn't a problem when everything is inconsistent...when roughness is the norm, the broad strokes matter more. emotion comes across so immediately, i pay less attention to the form of an image. mabel's freckles bounce as she turns, but it's not distracting. when samuel's hair blows in the wind, the line jumps wildly from frame to frame, but the feeling is preserved.
i think samuel will become one of those films that i come back to a lot in my work. also, i wonder...animation, ironically itself an imitation of life, has become increasingly mechanized, so...will this "human" line become a larger trend in animation? in art? i really hope so...
2_13_26 1:13 shanghai ∗mount frigus
recently completed this storyboard sequence as one of my final projects this semester. the source material is a script written by george wang, one of my professor's previous students. i ended up rewriting most of it to accommodate character, my own curiosities, what i wanted to draw et cetera, so i'm to be credited for any poorly articulated dialogue.
we began looking at scripts a couple weeks into the semester, so this was something i worked on over weeks, building it up a little each week. even still, there are parts i would still want to rewrite, change the pacing of, flesh out if i had more time. i noticed that after the thumbnail stage, i could block out entire sequences very quickly, but my poor sense of anatomy would slow me down again when it came time to clean things up. i did get better about using references though, and i could feel my sense of anatomy improving throughout the semester. however, this has motivated me to buy an anatomy book (anatomy for sculptors by uldis zarins, i really like it so far) and get at least a little more serious about it...i really think i could've saved at least half the time had i been able to draw certain angles and parts of the body from memory.
after taking this class, it's beginning to seem like story art might be the most fitting discipline for me to shoot for within animation. it gets me closer to the core of the story than animation, fulfills my need to write and draw, and it points in an interesting direction career-wise, which is directing. there's also plenty to learn, so it'll hold my short attention span. most importantly though, i like it and don't feel like a complete cog doing it. whether story art positions currently exist...well that's a different question...
thanks to zoya baker and the whole class for giving me great feedback and being nice people. i really enjoyed putting this together and will definitely be touching storyboard pro (or a free alternative) in the future.
12_3_25 18:10 supervising a 2-in-1 laundry machine ∗kurosawa's "dreams"
yesterday night i completed the feature "dreams" by akira kurosawa, after watching it in parts over the course of several days. currently the first "sunshine through the rain", second "the peach orchard", and fourth "the tunnel" vignettes are my favorite. in particular, "the peach orchard" captured a feeling that would sometimes overcome me as a child, that the world was unfair. i remember when i was around three or four, my mom ate the last of the rice she had cooked not knowing i was still hungry. when she offered to make more, i cried and screamed and begged to eat the rice in her stomach, which of course, she told me was impossible. as an adult, it seems silly that i tried to oppose such an obvious fact of nature. however, as a child, this very nature was unfair to me; how come once something was eaten, it could never be returned the same way? i often feel angry about the world as an adult, but this is not the same. i have never seen this feeling described in anything else.
i am also surpised by this: when i think back on the film, each vignette really feels just like a dream i'm trying to remember or a childhood memory i've revised into an abstraction throughout my life. more specifically, i finished the film feeling like i had actually dreamt these sequences. i feel like dream sequences in film are common, but i have never watched anything that actually felt like one, as opposed to just feeling "surreal". i'm not sure how kurosawa was able to do this, but i think the pacing, and the inconsequential way that he ends each vignette, imitate the experience of dreaming accurately.
i would recommend this movie to those who truly love nature.
so how is concrete doing p2
i finally got around to doing some more documentation for concrete...here's an evolution of august eating a popsicle over the last year and a half of production. it's hard to show a film without spoiling it, but i think this shot is short and inconsequential enough to post.
so how is concrete doing
well, it's...not too bad. i'm working with a composer who i got to know while animating on dream catchers. orchestration is a domain i know effectively nothing about but i will still go ahead and say their work is just incredible. they sent me a couple sketches today and i'm really excited for what's coming. gosh, i really don't like making music but i sure love the art form. it's probably a blessing, since i'm usually swamped by my inclination to make every part of a thing, and a curse, because i think the abstractness of music would really fit my personality...but moving on.
on the animation side of things (my side), progress is slow but steady. i'm not sure i'll meet my goal of finishing coloring before the end of the semester, because this last shot still requires quite a bit of work to clean up. on the bright side, i think it's very possible to get rough colors done by the end of winter break. so that'll be a nice way to ring in the new year...and hopefully i'll be able to do final touches and...background painting!...and maybe get a compositer on board next semester.
sometime i'll post a few colored clips.
11_19_25 14:02 still at ima ∗sunshine through the rain
yesterday in storyboarding we watched the first segment of kurosawa's dreams, sunshine through the rain. it's about ten minutes long, one of eight vignettes in the full feature, inspired by the director's recurring childhood dreams.
this is one of those films where i found myself unwilling to contribute to the class discussion after watching it, not because there was nothing to discuss, but because the film is so...quiet that i felt by talking about it i would dirty it somehow. any descriptions i could think of would be as meaningless as saying watching the film was like watching oil on concrete or something where i'm probably just thinking of rainbows. i still have a bit of this feeling now, so rather than analyzing any formal elements i will just list some things i started thinking about.
it was validating to learn that a film as loved as this one (i'm guessing, since i had heard about it before) could be as slow as it is. i have always loved long shots with no cuts. i realized since watching that somewhere during a longer shot that my perception began to shift, i became both less immersed and more immersed. less immersed in the sense that i began shifting my focus to things like composition, how nicely centered the boy is in the rainbow, for instance, since nothing in the frame is moving anyway. at the same time, i became more immersed as my anticipation for what was going to happen next was supplemented with a different anticipation, an anticipation for what was going to happen in the next cut. this cycle of waiting barely rewarded with more waiting and so on allowed me to experience the film in a new way.
the environments in sunshine in the rain made me feel something that i find difficult to articulate. i'm not sure whether to call them settings or characters or more general spaces. there is something i want to say about the pillars of trees and the house that are both so like palaces, or fortresses, or something. the kitsune moving like a train through this palace. a steady, relentless beating...life force. the house as a wall we never get to cross. and something about the flatness of the flower field against the boy, filling the entire frame.
i plan to watch this movie fully, maybe this weekend.
11_19_25 13:28 putting off work at ima ∗actually, more on obra dinn
i'm a bit embarassed that i didn't think too hard about the development when i first played it, as in i didn't fully how incredible the scale of the game is for a dev time of four years (well, that's a lot of time, but lucas pope is just one person). so maybe, not scale, but breadth? usually i love to point out how incredible it is that they were able to achieve this and this is how they did this and whatnot. but actually i think my lack of appreciation for its development while playing just speaks to my inexperience. as a player and as an artist. and also, i think it's because obra dinn was genuinely so immersive i didn't even have the chance to notice
11_17_25 9:29 int game dev lab ∗i have lots of thoughts and a pretty big ego
i've been very into reading the devlogs for obra dinn lately and finally made the push to start my own. i've been wanting to do so for a while now, as only having an employer-facing portfolio site and an instagram constantly teetering on the point of deletion (by my own hands), has started to feel far too restrictive for me. i like the idea of a devlog as a place to share my process, something i've always liked seeing from artists. often interesting ideas emerge that are not apparent in the final result. i think the culture of documenting the weird stuff that happens in the middle is one of my favorite parts about the indie game dev community. finally, i think this will just be a nice place to share stuff that i'm into. for this i am a big fan of tatsuki fujimoto's twitter where he recommends movies, desserts and even the weather outside. i want to achieve something that combines these ideas and is relatively uninhibited.
11_17_25 9:21 int game dev lab ∗