Collage Scrap Exchange

Here is my entry for the Collage Scrap Exchange contest organized by Papirmass and Brown Paper Bag! The theme this year was "New Landscapes". Pretty open-ended :)

This is how it works-- you are paired up with another artist who signs up from anywhere in the world, you exchange scraps with each other via mail, and then make a collage based on the theme using your own scraps and your partner's gifted scraps.

I've always been inspired by book-art / carvings I've seen online and wanted to try my hand in it. This is the first time I've taken collage art seriously! Obviously not the best craftsmanship, but it was fun thinking about the theme and juxtaposing the images with the text. (By the way, the book is a children's abridged version of Huckleberry Finn!). "New landscapes" is a theme very near and dear to me :)

plein air acrylic painting

I love my job! The lighting department here arranged a plein air painting class for us. The weather was awesome, the teacher was awesome!

It's been a very long time since I painted, that too with acrylics, so these count more as warm-ups than anything else:

Childhood!

Here's my submission to the latest bi-monthly Loop de Loop challenge. This time's theme is childhood.
Animated in TVPaint; music: 'Carefree' by Kevin MacLeod. Still waiting to hear back on whether or not this will be shown in their gallery, but here it is for the rest of you to see! Haven't animated in a while, so this was a fun, quick thing to do :)

Monkey Bars! - Loop De Loop Sept 2014 from Shreyasi Das on Vimeo.

Some recent figure drawings...

Lunchtime figure drawings at work + local drop-in classes in Palo Alto.

Also crossed off an item from my bucket-list recently, and performed spoke work poetry at a local art show, Ups, Downs, and Changes. My piece was titled "The Teachings of my Tears". More info on that later...

Wow, this blog is barren!

Don't worry! I've been upto stuff!

Since my last post, I have tetris-ed all my belongings into my modest Nissan Sentra and driven cross-country with my Dad. On the way, drove over a mountain rock in the middle of the night in Colorado on I-70, busted my front-left tire. Waited for the AAA truck to suffer the same fate, and the next one to come rescue us. First time in my life I have ridden in a car riding on a truck, in Colorado. As depressing as it was, the snow-capped mountains illuminated by the moonlight were gorgeous (in a frightening kind of way). We un-tetrised my belongings from my poor Sentra at a hotel parking lot while it snowed and sleeted and sent the car off to be fixed. Three nights (and several back-to-back reruns of Full House) later, we were out of Denver and on our way to toasty California.

Arrived in the Bay Area safe and sound (with emptier 'pockets' than anticipated) on April 17th. I've been working for the Lighting department at PDI | DreamWorks Animation Studios for about 5 months now. Yay! Working on the feature film, B.O.O.

More updates to come!

New Microfighters Episode!!

CLICK HERE TO SEE EPISODE!!

The first episode of the Microfighters series has been posted! I am so excited about how this turned out!
This was one of our studio's first longer episodes. I had the privilege of lighting all but three shots for this episode and compositing most of them in Fusion. Definitely had quite a few hiccups and there are things we would have liked to have done better, but it was still very fulfilling to work on :)

Enjoy!

Updated Lighting Reel

Lighting Reel 2013 from Shreyasi Das on Vimeo.

Updated my lighting reel with some shots from the LEGO Star Wars webseries that I am working on at Doodle Pictures Studios. As always, the demo reel break down is listed under the video description on the Vimeo page.

Check it out! 

I will be updating this as soon as more episodes are released online for public viewing. It would be nice to be able to show more than Geonosis ;)

LEGO Star Wars

Here's the episode I did some shot lighting for during my first two weeks at my new job at Doodle Pictures Studio!

And... PART II !

=)

Indian Film Festival of LA!

My thesis film was recently selected to be screened at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles! I am super excited to attend! 

Here are the Facebook events if you are interested in attending!:

IFFLA 2013 Opening Night Gala: GANGS OF WASSEYPUR

IFFLA Day 2- SHORTS #1, PAD YATRA, GANGS PART II, MOHAMMED TO MAYA

IFFLA Day 3- ILA, EEGA, FILMISTAAN, BBN SILSILA, Shorts #2

IFFLA Day 4- Shorts #1, PEDDLERS, BBN CHANDNI, SHIP OF THESEUS

IFFLA Day 5- Family Day, ARJUN, Panels, BEYOND ALL BOUNDARIES, MISS LOVELY, SALMA, Shorts #2 SHAHID

IFFLA Day 6- Yash Chopra Tribute: KABHI KABHIE, CELLULOID MAN, Closing Night Gala MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN

Ripples Excerpt

Excerpt from thesis film, Ripples.

Ripples Promo from Shreyasi Das on Vimeo.

{click to view}

Thor 2!

Modeled the entire typeface for the Thor 2 poster during my time at BLT Communications! I also did the rest of the alphabet and a variety of symbols so it can be used by the designers for posters being released worldwide! :)

Epicity

^ Excited to start working on this as a Lighting Technical Assistant at Blue Sky Studios! Just finished my first week at the studio and it's been great!

For the past 3 months, I had the privilege of working as a freelance 3D artist at BLT Communications on some awesome movie posters. Unfortunately, only one of them has been publicly released. I only contributed to a tiny fraction of the pixels on this one (modeled the bases underneath the armors), but still! Click to view larger!

An Article About "Dissonance"!

http://visionsfilm.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/visions-looking-back-dissonance/

Lighting Sketches, contd.

More lighting and mood "studies" from reference. Did these while marathoning Mad Men. :) This is actually a really fun exercise! I'm challenging myself not to use the eyedropper tool while doing these.

Lighting Sketches

I recently bought a DVD of Jeremy Vickery's master class on Efficient Cinematic Lighting and got the idea of making quick Photoshop sketches of different lighting scenarios from film stills and photographs. Thought I'd begin with a portrait... I was mostly just trying to emulate how the face is lit (and also practice painting and shading in Photoshop since I don't do that enough). Hopefully, doing a lot of these will give me a subconscious and better understanding of color, lighting, shadows, how different subjects react to light, etc. etc. On a side note, I'm getting better at hand-eye co-ordination using my Wacom tablet. I still miss my Cintiq though :)

Reference

Dirt Poor Filmmakers Festival

Ripples, my thesis film, just got into it's first festival! It'll be opening the first night of The Dirt Poor Filmmakers Festival series. 

Oil Paintings

Work from my oil painting class this quarter. I have never really worked with oils before so this was technically my first time. I wanted to take this class to get a better understanding of color and light and I think I learned quite a lot from this class! I'm pleased with how the materials/surfaces turned out, because I was hesitant about my ability to accurately paint the reflectivities of materials. We used water-based oil paint for this class.

This was my very first monochromatic painting for the class, done in one night. I was mostly trying to get a better handle of the medium and technique in this one.

This one was a two-night still life painting. Started with a subtractive underpainting and then used glazing techniques on top.

Quick portrait painting. This one was tough because of the absorbent nature of the canvas. We stretched out our own canvases and applied gesso on them. It was hard to keep the canvas wet with paint.

And this was our 3-night final project of a still life with a model. We were allowed to choose any part of the set up with the model and objects in front of us and make a composition out of it. This was my first time working this big (20x16). I tried to push myself here by introducing and experimenting with more colors than I usually do on each object.

 This was a really fun class!

Lighting Reel 2011

Current lighting reel! I'll add my thesis shots as and when I complete them.

1) Group Project with Paul W. Gerla during the Summer Pixar Undergraduate Program (2011). We had to come up with a short, two-shot narrative. I was responsible for the lighting, set-dressing, layout, some of the modeling as well helping develop the concept and design of the piece. Paul was responsible for modeling, shading as well as the fog-effect. 

Time taken for all aspects of the visuals: 5 days. Rendered using Renderman.

2)Lighting from Reference: a one-day exercise during the Pixar Undergraduate Program. Rendered using Renderman.

3)Final Compositing Project for a school Lighting Class. I worked with a photography student, Jami Ann Plekon. We planned the concept together and set up the lights in the photoshoot. I then built the CG cage to be composited into the photograph. Rendered using mental ray. Time taken: 5 days

4)Final project during the Pixar Undergraduate Program. I was responsible for changing the time of day from the original shot in Toy Story 3- from day to night. All the lights from the shot file were removed except for the default character light rigs. I was responsible for all the lighting. Everything else was created by Pixar. Time taken: 10 days. Rendered using Renderman.

(I chose this shot for its level of complexity: it has both a main human and toy character and the focus shifts from one to the other during the shot. In addition, there are several props, toys with fur, and a human with sub-surface scattering. I also wanted to challenge myself by trying to light a playtime scene at night while still keeping it friendly and warm. I took the liberty of cheating a night-light screen left, which was not there in the original film)

Acting for Animation

Blocking progress for my acting for animation final assignment:

And heeree is a very flattering video of me acting. I'm not very good at being angry usually so this was a bit challenging. I was feeling pretty weird... emotionally...by the end of the day after doing a billion takes of this!!

oldies.

Old piece of animation I dug up from last year's school files.

I have a problem with making things too pose-to-pose.