About me

HELLO!!!!

My name is Gerry Wang and I live in Richmond BC, Canada, studying in Richmond Secondary School Grade 11 (age 16). This blog is made for the submission of the Vancouver Film School Standout event.

I really want to have this very exclusive experience, as it would really broaden my view on the whole scheme of the animation and film industry.

Ever since grade 7, I had a goal of becoming an animator, and that goal has never been shifted. Through much exploration in many other career options, I have yet to find a decent enough occupation for me, that beats being an animator.

Little bit of my background:

I was living and studying in China for the most part of Elementary school. Since it was China, all students including me never had any chance to explore their future. All we did back then was sitting in our desks having huge headaches about the examinations in school.
I came to Canada in age 11, started Grade 7, which was wonderful to me. I had the chance to do more than math assignments and huge stacks of homework; I got to explore nature; most of all, I had the chance to meet my dream, and I am extremely thankful for that.

I first had contact with animation when in Grade 4 (still in China) by a magazine. There, it had a brief tutorial on how to animate a pendulum in Flash. I followed that tutorial, and made the pendulum. The ending result was very realistic, which made me decide that I should make something different on my own, and drew a VERY crude human figure dancing around with the most basic motion. The animation was not good, but at that time, a huge gush of pride flushed into my heart, filled me with delight. It felt great. After that, I never had a chance of making any more of those little projects for 3 years.

It was in Grade 7, a school project got me so into animation, that it continued to drive me passion, even today, thriving me to acquire more knowledge and skill.

As of now, I am still learning, still expanding my knowledge and vision, and never got bored of it, not for one minute.

My Animations

I have been making animations since grade 4, and still loving it. It has been my ambition to become an animator ever since. I am still very passionate about it.

Started my Animation since grade 4 (followed a tutorial about Flash animation on a magazine talking about how to make a pendulum swing)in China, and fell in love with it since then. For at least 2 years of not touching animation, till I Came to Canada, little did I know that a small event was going to change my life.

It was a school project, the teacher assigned it because he thought it was going to be fun. My teacher assigned us into groups, and we had to make a stop motion animation.

My group decided to make a claymation, but failed miserably. The arms of the characters would deform after a few poses, the character won't stand up half of the time, the lighting was messed up, everything went wrong. It was a disaster.

After my two group members gave up and left my house, I was going to dump all the play-doh away, and call it a day, but just couldn't do it. In my subconsciousness, the thought of getting it right and finish the project on my own could not escape from me.

Sitting on the couch doing nothing, drifting my eyes around hopelessly, I stopped on the DVD of the film "Chicken Run", deciding to pop the disc in and watch the extras and behind the scene materials. I was delighted to find out that their method of animation is completely different! They didn't move the limbs around to make a specific pose, instead, they made 50 limbs in different positions, and used each one specifically on individual shots!

Inspired by that, I decided to go back to the work station, and made a lot of legs/torsos all in different positions.

It took me another week to finish this:



I was proud.

After this little project, the long exhilarating feel of making an animation came back to me, and that time, I didn't let go.

Another animation I made, but this time was hand-drawn:


This is basically what I did:



After a while, I came back to Flash animation because drawing was not my thing (yet), which gained me a lot of respect and popularity inside my elementary school when I published my works.

Here's an example:

(based on The Incredibles)

People loved my work, they thoroughly enjoyed it, which further motivated me.

Wanting to make more than just Flash animations, wanting to expand further, I decided to make 3D animations.

I started off from a very easy-to-learn animation program, called anim8or, and picked up the basics in 2 months, grabbed my friends, and started on my new project.

As all of you know, kids could be easily influenced by other people or things. At that time. I was heavily under the influence of Pixar and the movie "The Incredibles". I made a movie about superheroes dressed in red... Just like The Incredibles.

(Watching this again 4 years later just makes me laugh. The bad rigging, the weird movement of the characters, my own adolescent voice, the general lame and cheesy-ness from a child's work is just funny xD)

I spent a LOT of time working on the project, and eventually finished it before graduating Elementary school (Being so committed to that project, missing a lot of homework was inevitable, and C's appeared on my report card), which again, caught a lot of attention, even the principal. He asked me to go show this to the whole school, and got me 15 minutes on the assembly to talk about it.

The amount of support I got when in grade 7 (my first year in Canada) was a huge boost to my confidence. I feel really lucky to have had this support.

When in high school, I picked up drawing, which really improved my animations, and made me notice little things such as the movement of the eyelids can express huge emotional change in a character.

I also "ditched" anim8or and picked up Blender 3D, which is another free 3D animation software that requires way more fiddling around than anim8or, and it is also more developed

After grade 9, my stage expanded onto the internet. People requested work from me, I was getting a lot of practice. Here's an example:

It was made as an introduction video for some drama class project a guy was working on.

A lot of my work were made for requests from a StarCraft gaming website, which I volunteered to help them out with for trailers of their events and other stuff.

My video for the event "Commentator Idol":

was noticed by another StarCraft website, and the main owner contacted me and offered me a reward if I make a opening video for them.

I obviously took the offer and made this:

And for my reward, I got THIS.
Not the best reward ever, but it is still pretty sweet (considering that it's my first gig ever).

Besides having people to use me as a tool to make animations, making short films in my spare time is also a hobby of mine.

My work:

This is a trailer for a movie that I was going to make, but my computer caught a spyware and the files for "the bird" was gone.

My work, "Addicted", was pretty popular amongst my grade, and it was even used as a presentation material for Richmond Addiction Services:


Some background story for this movie:

I heard the news about the boy that got mad because he got his Xbox taken away. My friends and I thought it was pretty funny (although it's not... pardon our teenage mentality), and so my friends urged me to make it into a satirical animation.

After writing the script, I went out to look for voice actors and a voice actress.
Since we don't have any female friends that sounds like a mother, other alternatives had to be resorted. I went online and searched for this voice of the mother. It wasn't a hard process looking for a voice, all that had to be done was me requesting voice samples from a girl that I know in that StarCraft website. She had a decent mother's voice, and she deserved the role. I let her record all the lines from the script that the mother says and let me do the compiling. For the father's voice, a friend of mine volunteered to record. For the kid's voice, my friend and I used Audacity to raise the voice actor's pitch so it would actually sound like a 10-year-old.

From this grabbing-the-voice-actor experience, I realized that a decent sized social network is needed for me to make higher quality animation.

and oh yes, this animation was done before I knew much about animation and how to properly make it.

That is all for my little "presentation" on my animation, I really look forward to getting in Vancouver Film School and get some professional training so it would enable me to express my creativity without my lack of skill dragging me down.

Check out my YOUTUBE CHANNELS for more of my work!!

UPDATE:

So I was accepted to the VFS Stand Out program and had a really awesome experience there! Here's the work that I've done:



The youtube video of this (bad render for the second part) was posted up by the VFS blog post over HERE

For the first piece, which was done on the afternoon of the first day, was my first ever paper animation that I made since the ninja man back in grade 7, and I had a blast working on it.

For the second piece, the 3D animation done on the morning of the second day, turned out really well, given that I did it completely out of my intuition, which means that there was no structure both in terms of the workflow and the actual result that never came up in my head.

My Drawings

Having a good artistic taste builds an animator's foundations. Without art elements inside an animation, the animation would just be objects moving. It would be hard to make a character alive or creating a landscape that is breath-taking without some sharp observations. I think the only way of building these observations are by seeing what you see, and express the elements of the things that you see on a piece of paper.

Here, I am going to show you some of my drawings and the story behind them.


THE BEGINNING

I started drawing at the age of 4. The first drawing I did in a formal class setting with teacher's assistance is this:

This drawing caught my teacher's eyes. She was very surprised that I made the fish THIS big on the middle of the paper. She said that the very daring method of drawing can help me express myself very well. She said my potential in drawing was very great, and I should really develop this potential into a forte.

Here are more of my works
(click on the images to expand)





STAGE 2

After 10 years of quitting the original drawing class, I resumed my drawing career again to build solid foundations for animation.
starting with the basics, I drew sculptures:


Then I moved on an drew some organic shapes, such as this: (recent work)





COLOUR DRAWINGS

I am pretty proud of this one:

My teacher gave me a photography of some sort, with a picture of a pond with blue colour scheme on the left and red scheme on the right. He asked me to use chalk to reproduce the picture. Since it was chalk, creativity could flow out very easily. I drew this picture, and went all out with every relevant colour. The result turned out to be good.



For my school's art class, I have to draw a creative picture every month. For the month of October, I decided to draw something organic and colourful, and searched in google images for references. After the search, this picture came up.

I drew down the flower just like how it is on that picture, but being original was my goal, so I was in need of a new background. After sitting on my sofa brainstorming about all sorts of possible backgrounds, such as a hand, a man holding the flower, a dog running around, and all kinds of crazy things. No good ideas came up, so I flipped through my old drawings looking for more inspiration.

When I was flipping through my stuff, THIS CAME UP.

It was just like that, the idea of a close-up of a girl's face would be shown and having that flower in her hair suddenly came up, and struck me.




You can see more work from me if you follow this LINK.


Update:

At around christmas 2009 I started doing this drawing of the Pillars of Creation inside the eagle nebula, and it took me another two weeks to finish.



Well, so far, this is the drawing that I put the most heart into, and within the 20-30 layers of pencil crayon colour, all of those little lines contained my vast appreciation for the universe and nature.


The drawing below is a little caricature of my friend, and that was drawn for his birthday. That was my first attempt at drawing something like this, and I think it was pulled off quite well. The drawing does show the essence of the person, and is really identifiable. He really enjoyed that drawing, and I do feel happy about that.



Drawn with a black pencil crayon.

Chinese Calligraphy

Besides animating and drawing, I also write Chinese Calligraphy.

Chinese Calligraphy is on itself another form of art. The skill that one needs to acquire to write Chinese Calligraphy well is tremendous. Writing Chinese Calligraphy needs calmness, boldness, concentration, and a thorough understanding of the font type the artist is writing with.

Because a good calligraphy writer needs all of these attributes, the writer needs to be a jewel of a person. The artist need to be the most perfect in the aspect of patience, attention span, and inner strength.

I have changed as a person since I started Calligraphy. I now take pride in my patience, my calmness, and my higher level of concentration. Although I have changed a lot since I started, I am still no where near as virtuous as those people that have been writing Calligraphy for their whole life.

I have been writing Calligraphy for at least 7 years, and I am still very out of practice for me to do very steady and strong strokes. This form of art is one of my favourite kinds, because if one wants to perfect their writing for a specific character, one has to practice hundreds of times to achieve the result. This is just like what my dad says: "You can make nothing beautiful when you don`t work hard."

Below are some of my calligraphy materials:


This is me when I was 10:


I was concentrating very hard.

Software skills

Although software doesn't do the creativity, and they are just tools, I did gain a lot of experience fiddling around with them. It's the lessons I learned when figuring out the software that was valuable, and those lessons are much more cherishable than the individual knowledge that I gained for using a specific sofware.

When I learned software such as Flash, Blender 3D, Anim8or, and currently Autodesk Maya, I never sought any additional help other than a couple of essential tutorials.

I figured out how to make a character do whatever I want by looking at a walking cycle tutorial. I figured out different light setups by pure experimentation, and through the experiments, I learned a lot more than I could have by looking at a tutorial.

My friend said that having to make a big switch from using a particular animation software (or any kind of software) to another one is like pulling a tree right out of its ground. I completely disagree with him, because all animation software are achieving the same goal: to provide the tools for creative purposes

I think the problem for many people that want to switch from one software to another is that they don't fully understand the software developer's intention, and that person might think that the concept of the new software is the same as the old one, and they get things mixed up really easily. I usually don't have a problem of understanding what the developer of the software want the user to do to make use of the full potential of the software, but when I misunderstand or assume what the developer was thinking, it would take me a long time to figure out that I was wrong.

For me, I don't have much of a problem switching between softwares. It took me about 2 months to transition from Flash to Anim8or. When I was in Grade 7, I posted my Flash animations at around December, and finished my 3D work at June (You might have noticed the animation was very rushed). When I was done with Anim8or, I picked up Blender 3D, which was very confusing for me because of the unusual interface, but I eventually understood the logic. It took me about a month to figure out the basic modeling and character rigging skills of Blender.

Having no helper around me was at times painful. From time to time, I encounter technical difficulties, and it takes me a very long while to solve it. The bright side about the whole solving-by-my-self thing is that when I go through the solving process, I look for every possible solution, which would bring me to areas that I would not even bother touching, and force me to learn stuff about that area. That would help me a lot, because someday, I might encounter some other problem concerning about that area, and I would know how to solve it.


SOFTWARE

Animation software:

-Flash 5, Flash MX
-Swift 3D
-Anim8or
-Blender 3D
-Autodesk Maya

Other Software

-Windows Movie Maker
-iMovie
-Sony Vegas 7.0
-Adobe Premiere
-Adobe Photoshop

Social Activities

When I take a trip outside of home and into the nature, I don`t just look and forget about it the next day. I either take a really long time sitting on my chair when I get back, and think about every memorable detail and burn it in my brain, or I write it down on a journal. The picture below was a journal of a trip I made to a lake when I was in China. I was about age 9 when I wrote this journal.

Translation:
My dad and I went to the east city lake, rented a motorboat, which I sailed around with my parent`s permission. While we were on the boat, my dad talked about the subject of beauty. I noticed some stuff too, such as the lake`s wavering water, the thin strands of grass, the bending pathway on the shore, and the very elegantly constructed porch, they were all beautiful. Ten minutes later, I saw a lot of waste floating on the surface of the water, then I saw some old lady picking up the garbage, and I noticed that they were pretty tired too. My dad said: ``beauty and hard work almost always interconnect. You can make nothing beautiful when you don`t work hard.`` That old lady was working hard and she was very tired, but because of her labour, the lake`s beauty can be accentuated.
After we got off the boat, my dad took me to look at some stone carvings of Chinese Calligraphy. My father saw the character ``lu`` (it is one of the characters in my Chinese name. It means road, or path.) and said: ``you see how it is written? Are you able to write it as beautifully as this?" I realized that Calligraphy really is beautiful, I really want to learn it.
This trip to east city lake gained me a lot. I have learned what is beautiful. I feel very happy.
(end of translation)

About a year ago, my family and I went to Deer Lake for a day in Burnaby, and my family wanted to make this trip memorable, as apposed to take a go-and-forget trip. My dad thought of an idea, which is to make a poster, and describe the main aspects of the place, both as a social experience for me, and for the family to remember.

We took pictures on the trip, hundreds of them. In the pictures, there are a lot of information about the place, and I gathered these information and condensed it on the poster.

This is the original poster (in Chinese):


And this is the English version of the poster (I photoshoped it):


I also wrote a little article about the scenery (in Chinese), and it was used as a textbook material in my Dad's own Level 7 Mandarin class.


These two pictures are photographs of the Columbia glacier in Alberta. It was taken about a two years ago when my family went on a nice long trip.

I also went to Salt Spring City in Vancouver island a year ago. Here are some pictures



The last picture was my dad telling a joke to the goat :)

Update:

There's a class in school that I took called Peer Tutor, which is a class that gives senior student opportunities to attend junior students' classes and assist both the teacher's teaching and the students' learning, the course evaluates how well the tutor helped out a class.

On one occasion, my class teacher asked me to teach one little lesson on a form of poetry, called "If poem". That form of poem takes a common phrase or saying translate it and hypothesize how the phrase would be if it's completely literal.

In order to teach that lesson, I had to write the poem myself. The poem that I wrote turned out so well that the teacher was in awe. This is how it is:

If the sky was the limit
There will be no astronauts that children look up to
There will be no exploration of space
And Astronomy would be a subject of myth.

If our imagination is limitless
We can understand the universe
We can understand what it is like to live in a four dimensional world
And the wonders of deep space would be at the low levels of our comprehended beauty

If beauty was only skin deep
Then the roots of trees would rot
The stems of flowers corrupt
And the mystic nebulae would merely be paintings.

Other Activities

I enjoy a lot of stuff outside of just the ones mentioned above


PHOTOGRAPHY


Sometimes I take a break from animation, and do something else that is also as constructive, such as taking pictures of the outside world.

Here are some of the pictures I took:




COOKING

Beside taking photographs, I cook dinner for my family from time to time, which I really enjoy for some reason. Here is a picture of one of my latest ``works``:





BADMINTON


A teenager cannot live without moving around a lot and getting some exercise, and one of my favourite form of exercise is playing Badminton (kind of stereotypical). The following video was me playing Badminton when I was around 9 years old.





MUSIC


I also play piano. I like playing piano, even though I didn't when I was little. Playing piano can really let me relax and and enjoy the music through myself.

I am not bad at piano, I remember I got second place in a piano contest in my Elementary school when I was in grade 3, and I completed level 8 in China when I was 9.
Now that I am in Canada, I stopped doing fancy competition stuff, I just enjoy.

It's hard to believe how much I practiced to get one of my level 8 songs to sound good, here is the song, performed by me:

(click on the image to listen)



My certificate for passing level 8:



Here is a video of me practicing for level 5



another clip of me practicing (for level 8)



2 years later, I came out of China, to Richmond B.C, and got a nice place to stay. Fortunately, there is an old piano in there, it is not tuned very well, but it does the job.



My family bought an apartment later on, which doesn't include a piano. My parents bought me a digital piano instead. It was not expensive, and does the job quite well, and it can do other stuff, like this:

PRETTY GOOFY STUFF

SCULPTURES


I did attend some art classes in high school (to be honest, that course was not entirely useful) and made some sculptures.

Here's one in Grade 8:

Nothing really special, just want to show it to you.

Here's one that I made recently:


Inspired by "boo" from Mario (the face).



ACHIEVEMENTS

I have had some success in my life, so I am going to present my success.

-Winning the first place (in both short story and poem categories) in the city's English Oral competition when I was grade 5 in China


-Getting second place in my elementary school's piano contest in China.

-Completing grade 8 of piano in China when I was 9 years old

-Placed in second category in a nation-wide English contest in China


-Being the shortest kid ever :)

THAT'S ALL FOLKS!