Look at Me is up and running happily!

Yay, that is quite great, right?

So, please visit

Look at Me, the confessions of an obsessive compulsive workaholic.

And enjoy. I apologize if it's bad! I'll try harder every week XD!

For now it's being updated daily or almost daily, but soon it will turn to a two day update kind of thing! YAY!

Best, best, best!

Vera.

Look at Me, web-comic pre-release.

Oh Mr Crumbles, leaving all the crumbs, getting obsessed over petty things. Yes, yes, I know, crumbs are horrible and messy. But what can you do, Mr Crumbles, it is in your nature...

Futile/Fertile

As we find ourselves in the age of androgyny, where the sex roles have become as unstable as Windows Vista, some become prisoners of a hyper-visual, hyper-consumerist, hyper- vane society. And they choose to disappear, denying their nature.

Futile or fertile?

Photoshop + Cintiq + 30 min of spare time = a happy illustrator.

Eye Level Review - first public display.

This is great, yet terrifying. My work is being exposed publicly in Gastown, at Cambie and West Cordova. It is quite a project, involving several artists, some of them homeless, some street graffiti masters. All of us with our own vision, our own discourse, but with a common goal of intervening public space, cheering the crowd. The project was conceptualized by Andrew Owen, a crazy, amazing guy from Toronto. Definitely check out his site, just wow.

The piece I made for the entry is called "Offseted Cloud Dissipation No1" and implies several stages of creation:

a) First I animated the clouds dissipating, I scanned in the animation and I devided the frames in 9 pieces. Every piece was printed separately and assembled into a huge stencil.



b) Then white paint was applied



c) Then orange



d) For five times in a row.



Enjoy

Agology.

A great project I am working on right now, a documentary based on the life of Agah Bahari, his struggles in Iran and how he struggled as a musician during the rise of the regime. I am in charge of the animation piece that tells some of the childhood stories.

Here are some first concept art and character designs. The design is based on the image of Gilgamesh and the ancient Babylonian imagery, as well as the puppet aesthetics, those are slightly easier to work with in Flash, in which the animation is going to be produced.

Online portfolio.

The system demands a nice and round portfolio, therefore, we will give it to them.


Vera's online portfolio

And it's form follows it's primary function: to communicate design.

Effects

Effects animation could be rather considered advanced motion dynamics. The thrill one experiences while roughing out the motion of fluids or the dissipation of smoke is liberating. The creation of complex particle behavior with a pencil would definitely fall into the visual natures physics analysis category and the power of one's observation of the forces that govern this universe.

ratsinthewalls

Rats in the Walls is a current art direction project that has been engaging me in the exploration of new styles and new visual conceptions of space. Working with two tone high contrast images gives the opportunity to study the power of the siluette, as well as refine compositional skills in storyboarding.

Stone + straight jacket

A flash character pre-development.

One day - one essay.

An optimist would perhaps state that every day is worth living for the simple reason of being, existing. A "descartian" optimist would defy the joy of everyday existence in the process of thought ignited by the daily routine. A caffeine accelerated mind will definitely grab this opportunity as an inspiration for a long term project: one day one visual essay.

First essay. On creation.

BGger than life.

An animation without a context is, perhaps, a product of vanity, since what drives its creation is the sole concern for the beauty of the movement. A background, even as simple as a colour card, has the opportunity to enhance animation.

These two illustrations were background assignments at VFS that required extra care, since they supposed to mimic the style of the Sam & Max animated show.




vs

The Release.

Our minds are pushed towards the creation of panoptic visions, shivering sounds, wild beats. That is the world of The Release. A world in which a man within a man gallops towards a release, his release, his freedom.

The piece was created in less than a month as part of the flash course we take as VFS classical animation students. Therefore, there was serious time restriction for the completion of the animation. Enjoy this glimpse of an idea getting out of a human's head.

Untamable Matter

In a surrealistic display an enigmatic performer, The Creator, reveals the audience the conception of thought and image by manipulating time in the world of animation. My final project at VFS is a questioning of the media in which the film was created, as well as a tribute to animation, therefore it plays with timing and movement not only on a conceptual level, but also on a technical one.

Without the human mind, time stops, sec, minutes, frames do not exist. Time is a variable that partly defines our entire cosmovision, controlling it would mean control our surrounding. Controlling it would mean controlling past, present, future. This could sound impossible, meanwhile, the true deconstruction of the 4th dimension already exists. Animation breaks down time into drawings, into symbols, into arcs, freezing and capturing 1/24th of a one second movement. Obtaining that, creating that means, at least for me, regaining time at human's service. "Untamable Matter" is just a humble attempt to portray these fascinating qualities.

Life Drawing Portfolio.

Life drawing for animation has a unique quality to it: you deliberately disengage from the realism of the model, finding the forces, the pose and the line of action as the main variables for achieving a good result . As you stand, analyzing the human body, you visualize a blank canvas, a wireframe, a complex grid that allows to recreate any character in a realistic world. Therefore, the exercises presented here have as the main objective the recreation of the forces and the laws that govern this world with the sole purpose of enhancing and developing a more realistic animation style.

30 sec poses.





2 min poses.











5 min poses.








Portraits.