Judy Lee

Thesis film 2011

2012-01-08T19:09:00.002-05:00

Nigiri

Nigiri from Judy Lee on Vimeo.

African Wild Dog

2011-07-14T18:02:00.004-04:00

Practice

It feels good going back to some animal drawings! I love African wild dog.

I'm in a doggy mood

2011-06-15T09:23:00.002-04:00

So I just felt like doing this :3

and this :3

Tissue paper + fingers

2011-03-15T03:38:00.001-04:00

= fun!

Tabinohito

2011-03-14T02:23:00.001-04:00

Kitty

2011-03-14T01:01:00.000-04:00

some doodles

2011-03-08T01:30:00.000-05:00

7

2011-03-08T01:22:00.000-05:00

Varekai-Bird

2011-03-08T01:16:00.000-05:00

Spot

2010-12-22T03:58:00.007-05:00

Some concept arts from a more refine version of one of my old idea

*Click to see the original post*

"S P O T"

A young monk tried to use a more efficient way to accomplish his daily chores through a self-invented magic that brought his writing alive into helpful animal assistances. Would he be able to control the monsters and in the same time keep it a secret from his master?

Some sketches

2010-12-22T03:37:00.006-05:00

Shrimp and man

2010-11-27T21:53:00.000-05:00

Dog of the day - 1019

2010-10-20T00:50:00.003-04:00

Mood picture - 1018

2010-10-18T22:11:00.002-04:00

Power upgrade!!!

Mood picture - 1016

2010-10-16T23:41:00.000-04:00

Calming...

Mood picture - 1015

2010-10-15T21:31:00.001-04:00

Drawing reference from Corbis.com
Bengal Tigress Kills a Chital Deer

One day after comic con...

2010-10-11T23:27:00.000-04:00

Batmans!!!
Did some doodles on the subway tonight.
Personally favor the doggy bat at the bottom left :D

Shrimp - watercolor

2010-09-20T00:00:00.000-04:00

Animal live drawing

2010-09-19T23:59:00.010-04:00

@ Bronx zoo

Sketches for Illustration - Tribal Spaceman

2010-09-19T23:41:00.010-04:00

Illustration class
Topic: Adjective + character (Randomly pick from an envelope)
and I got "Tribal Spaceman"!!!

Here are the 4 sketches:

Boston Terrior character design

2010-09-11T22:25:00.002-04:00

I got inspired by looking at Chinese guardian lion...

Some Sketches

2010-04-13T14:56:00.009-04:00

House M.D.

2010-04-13T14:22:00.003-04:00

Some doodling of the TV show, House M.D.

I enjoy the show
Hugh Laurie is such a character!

Animation Demo Reel 2010

2010-03-22T23:13:00.011-04:00

Judy Lee 2010 Demo Reel from Judy Lee on Vimeo.

Music: White's Dream by Plaid

- Links to original clips shown in the reel-

01 Girl Puppet in After Effect

02 6-legged walk cycle

03 Tiger clip from "animated short"

04 Handing Letter Assignment

05 Man Lip Sync

06 Animal Crossing Street

07 "What Happens When a Fly Falls into a Coffee Cup?"

08 Monkey clip from "animated short"

09 Clips from "Ugly Americans" - Internship @ Augenblick Studios

.

Character design

2010-03-22T22:51:00.001-04:00

Claude Estee

from The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West

{Character Description}

“He had no belly at all. He was a dried-up little man with the rubbed features and stooped shoulders of a postal clerk. The shiny mohair coat and nondescript trousers of that official would have become him, but he was dressed, as always, elaborately. In the buttonhole of his brown jacket was a lemon flower. His trousers were of a reddish Harris tweed with a hound tooth check and on his feet were a pair of magnificent rust-colored bluchers. His shirt was ivory flannel and his knitted tie a red that was almost black.”

Man Lip Sync

2010-03-22T22:43:00.002-04:00

"Well, he threw down his paper and walked right out of the room!"

[Close up]

More Froggies

2010-03-22T09:53:00.000-04:00

Some sketches for my 3rd year final short

Well, the dogs are not in the film thought XD

Handing Letter Assignment

2010-02-08T22:38:00.001-05:00

Designing 2 characters,
One hands a letter to the other,
and show their reaction.

Horse Walk Cycle

2009-12-17T21:11:00.001-05:00

I really enjoyed drawing horses!

Tree Observation

2009-10-30T22:15:00.001-04:00

Maya-Room Assignment

2009-10-28T17:14:00.001-04:00

The assignment is to create a room.
I started up with a dark and cold concrete cellar, which somehow turned into a weird Tibetan style bed room with my dorm-room desk in it by the end...

I didn't do the fish image on the wall. It was done by an artist that inspires me a lot.
Check out Robin Joseph's website, and here is the original post where the image was from. I really like that picture, so I borrowed it just for this class assignment.

Strawberry and Cheereal

2009-10-26T22:04:00.000-04:00

I Luv Boston Terriers

2009-10-23T21:28:00.002-04:00

In addition, I'm here to present --- a Boston Territoad

It's a toad dog : )

I Luv Frogs

2009-10-23T21:06:00.001-04:00

We were analyzing Charlotte's Web in children's literature class while I drew those frogs over my notes.

Animated Short (2nd year)

2009-05-14T22:26:00.001-04:00

This is a short about a little monk who can turn his writing into living beings.

Concept art and some sketches:

Here is the first half of the storyboards from my original plan
I guess I will just show these for now and keep the ending in secret XD

Digital Compositing Reel 2008-2009

2009-05-14T20:35:00.001-04:00

Works from digital compositing class:

The music in this reel is “Attack of Butterflies” by Joe Hisaishi.
It is from a Korean movie named Welcome to Dongmakgol Village.

The first two assignments can be found in my older posts:

"Animating Puppet in After Effect"

"6-legged Walk Cycle"

Here are the rest of the assignments in their complete versions:

In this assignment, the instructor gave us a live action footage of a pan of a street scene and asked us to add any kinds of animation of effect to it. I decided to turn the original footage into an image with outline only, and added an illustration of a kid with a turtle, and animated all the strokes.

The music is from the soundtrack of The Sky Crawlers.

Later on, we got another assignment with another footage of a street. This time we had to animate an animal crossing the street. I decided to do that a little differently…

The last one in the reel was actually a pretty early work.

It was a lip-sync assignment in which we changed the mouth shapes with After Effect.
I got the audio from an anime short named “KAKURENBO”
and designed my own characters for it.

This demon uses a puppet of a little girl as bait,
and seizes children once they approach it.

Tribeca Film Festival opening

2009-03-29T23:07:00.000-04:00

An assignment for the submission of Tribeca Film Festival opening

Animation final project- test

2009-03-29T23:02:00.000-04:00

What Happens When a Fly Falls into a Coffee Cup?

2009-01-30T17:27:00.000-05:00

Digital compositing Assignment:
Do a short animation from any post we find in the personal ads section on Craig's list. The animation has to be at least 40 seconds and full-colored.

I happened to find a joke among those ads, and I had fun animating it.

the original post on website is already expired
but here is the original joke that was on the post :
(I only did it for class work, the joke does not represents my point of view)

What happens when a fly falls into a coffee cup?

The Italian - throws the cup and walks away in a fit of rage.

The Frenchman - takes out the fly, and drinks the coffee.

The Chinese - eats the fly and throws away the coffee.

The Russian - drinks the coffee with the fly, since it was extra with no charge.

The Israeli - sells the coffee to the Frenchman, the fly to the Chinese, Buys himself a new cup of coffee and uses the extra money to invent a device that prevents flies from falling into coffee.

The Palestinian - blames the Israeli for the fly falling in his coffee, protests the act of aggression to the UN, takes a loan from the European Union to buy a new cup of coffee, uses the money to purchase explosives and then blows up the coffee house where the Italian, the Frenchman, the Chinese, and the Russian are all trying to explain to the Israeli that he should give away his cup of coffee to the Palestinian.

Anatomy-Hand drawing assignment

2009-01-10T18:18:00.004-05:00

-skeches

-Final drawing
30"x30" (roughly), charcoal, Nov. 01, 2008

2nd Year Anatomy-Fall semester

2009-01-10T15:07:00.000-05:00

Now I can move on to my present works.
My Anatomy class~~~
During the class, students practice figure drawing and learn the structures of human bones and muscles. Every class we have a model, and the instructor will put a skeleton posed the same as the model. We learned the bones first, then move on to muscles, and we will still be learning muscles during the next semester.
For homework each week, we draw the parts we will be learning from the suggested text book---"Artistic Anatomy" by Dr. Paul Richer. It's a really useful book, I like it.

The following are the homeworks in this semester. All the drawings are on 18"x24" papers.
(Please bare with the dark and weird lighting in my dorm...=_=

The Cat Circus

2009-01-09T02:40:00.000-05:00

Another 1st year work~
After the black and white drawing assignment,
we got a color one also for 20"x30".

As I struggled with idea for the color drawing,
I made these 2 characters in my animation class:

Sorry if it doesn't look clear.
It is a little clown holding a long~long~cat.

It was an sound effect exercise.
Students matched their animation with the sound effect they were assigned.
That was the sound I got (owo)
And that was where I got the idea for my color drawing from XD

Final drawing: 20"x30", Acrylic

The last one was just a random picture I did in Photoshop for fun~

Illustration- The Fish Night Market

2009-01-07T16:31:00.002-05:00

This was the assignment we got during the 1st year Drawing class when we started to learn composition. Students were asked to do a 20”x30” black and white illustration with any medium.

Since it was a black and white piece, I wanted to make it a powerful picture with strong contrast of light and shadow. Before I knew what I was going to draw, I decided I want my character to stand against the light. Then I found out a night market would be an ideal scene for the atmosphere I wanted to create.
Therefore, I created a floating fish night market.
All the booths in the market floated on sea, and people shopped on boats.
And my 3 characters in the drawing were:
A boy and 2 kappas (Japanese water spirits)
The illustration would be one of the events from their adventure in the market.

I came out with 3 sketches in the upper left picture
and decided to do the top one.

The final drawing was done with watercolor and charcoal

After coming out this scene and the characters, I had fun developing the idea even though the drawing assignment was over.
I really like the fish vending machine idea actually haha

Hope I can make it another illustration piece one day~

There is one thing I have to point out
Some people might find out my boy character looks almost the same as Kuro in Tekkon_Kinkreet
Yes, you are right. (I admit my guilt …orz)
I love that character tooo much!!! and Shiro tooXD
But I tried to make change on my character design during the process (but still looks like him…orz…
My inspiration can be found in one scene in which Kuro wares a pair of pants with the fish character (魚) on it.

Anyway, Tekkon-Kinkreet is definitely one of my favorite animated films.
I admire STUDIO4℃ & Taiyo Matsumoto!!!

In the end, I actually made a story out of that illustration.
At the end of the 2nd semester, I realized it could be my animation final.
And use the black and white drawing as the opening of the short XDD

I borrowed the music from Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away and edited it a little bit. I had been thinking about doing something with that soundtrack since the first time I heard it. Spirited Away is also one of my favorite animated films.

Miyazaki is one of the two important figures that inspires me into making animation (the other one being Walt Disney ^^)
And Joe Hisaishi is the famous composer who does the film scores for Miyazaki's animations.
I'm a big fan of Joe Hisaishi.
His music always touch my heart.
I often use his music for my animation excersices.
In fact, the music for the bird elevator animation short from the previous post is also done by him.
It was "A Waltz of Sleigh" from a Korean film named
Welcome to Dongmakgol Village.

.....................................................................................................................

Friend: So the 1st semester you freed bird (see the last post),
_____the 2nd semester you freed fish.
_____What animal are you going to free next? XD
Wolfy: Um…(just realized the similarity of that 2 stories…)

Storytelling - The Birdcage Land

2009-01-04T01:04:00.000-05:00

Forgot I still have some old works from last year that I should keep a record. Guess from now I would like to post some 1st year old works before I go back to my recent works.

Ok, so during the first year, we had a wonderful class called
Storytelling for Animation.
Too bad it was only a one-semester course ) =3=)
I really like that class, and we got a very good instructor.
Besides the routine class lectures on film theories and principles in both animation and cinema, the main goal of this class was, at the end of the course, everyone should be able to present a well-development story in professional way.
That meant creating a formal treatment for the story, some character designs, a screenplay, a storyboard, and pitch notes, etc. We had the whole semester to do all that. The instructor would spare half of the class help us with our story after he finished his lecture.

The origin of my story actually had to trace back to a random doodle I made several years ago.
It was a girl prisoner with a birdcage on her head
>> So they were both caged ( -_- )
The character 囚
could be interpreted as prisoner or to imprison.
I somehow thought of that old drawing when we were asked to create a story for class. I pretty like that girl character, so it would be a good chance to develop a story for her, and the idea would pretty much be dealing with being caged and having freedom. The girl ended up not the leading character in my story, but she still plays a important role.

After coming out with a story idea.
We summarized our stories into one-page treatments.
The formal treatment had to by typed in only Courier font.

Here is my story---The Birdcage Land

The story takes place on a lovely morning. A traveling LOCKSMITH rode his motorcycle on a country road in a very good mood. Then, he saw a little bird held in an old birdcage hanging on a tree on the side of the road. The locksmith was a very kind person and felt pity for the bird, so he used his key to set the bird free. He later found out the bird in the cage was a sign of his next destination-Birdcage Land, where the entire country was held in a gigantic birdcage. Everything in the city was operated with the help of birds, and all the birds were held in cages when they were not at work.

The locksmith had fun watching the birds controlling the traffic, dragging people by carriage, and then he went to the top of the tallest building by bird-elevator. The top floor was a hospital where he was impressed by a little patient who stayed in the hospital. It was a LITTLE GIRL wearing a birdcage like a hat on her head. Inside the cage, there stood the girl’s beautiful BIRD friend: The bird was covered with golden feathers from head to toe. Its rainbow-colored wings were tied with ribbons on two bars of the cage, the end of the long wings hung down on both sides of the girl's head. Which made it look like the girl had her rainbow-colored pig tails tied up. The locksmith and the girl became good friends. However, as they sat on the balcony watching wild birds fly freely outside, the locksmith noticed how the girl longed for being free. Just then the locksmith came up with a fantastic idea …

Early, next morning when the city was still sleeping, a shadow ran across every street in the city, unlocked every door he encountered with his keys and tools, and opened all the birdcages. As the birds flew freely over the sky, the locksmith showed up at the sleeping little girl's bedside. The pretty bird sat alone in the cage right beside the girl. He noticed that the girl had lost all her hair because of the medical treatment. Gently, he woke her and opened the window for her to see the splendid moment. As the girl walked towards the window, the excited key-maker freed her bird friend from the cage. Before the little girl could take any reaction, the bird flew out the window. The locksmith was so happy and satisfied at what he had accomplished, he failed to notice the sorrow swelling in the little girl’s eyes. Jumping on his motorcycle, the locksmith left the city with hundreds of thousands of birds flying above him. He continued on his journey to the next city, without knowing that he just caused the whole city to stop running because of his “good deed.”

The main point of this story is to show that one person’s idea of a good deed or gain, can mean the loss or suffering to another.
That’s how everything goes.
There is no certain policy or certain solution that will satisfy everyone.
There are always people benefit from one thing, while some suffer from it.
Nothing is perfect.

I made a quick sketches for the city that is held in a gigantic cage

and the bird elevators mentioned in the treatment

Here is what would happens if the elevator is overload... XD

Then the character design for the two main characters.

After all those sketches, I ended up prefer this simple style as my final character design.
Because I want a pure and fresh look for the story.

I actually animated the elevator scene for my 1st year animation class.
It was the final for the 1st semester, and it supposed to be a 30-second short.
I took that as a great exercise of drawing birds XD especially flying birds
Pretty challenging, though.

The walking person in the first part supposed to be the locksmith…
doesn't look like him I know…nevermind
At that time I just wanted to showed the idea,
so all the birdcages didn’t have railings.
(Just say I didn’t have the energy to do that =_= )

I didn't know After Effect during the first year, so the intro part, the ending logo and the music were not included in the short originally when I turn it in as final. At that time we were just freshmen so we do most of the things manually without computer. So I had layers of paper for each frame, which made everything look dark and not clear. And the panning scene in the beginning is also manually so it’s a little bit jumpy.
Not very good quality but still tolerable ^ ^
It was not until the 2nd year when we finally learned to scan every animation drawing, color each frame in Photoshop, import them into After Effect alone with a soundtrack, and make a movie file. So now I can lay my hand back on this short again and add music, introduction, ending and all that to make this short at least look a little bit better XD

I actually made a whole setting for this short but ended up not be able to show them all. The building in the short is the hospital. Its setting was showed as the one picture in the intro of the short, but I'm sure it is hard to see because it is too small.
The entire setting about the hospital's elevator is showed below
(and it's bigger XD)

And this is my originally plan for the 30-second animation,
But I ended up cutting one scene out because that was too much work.

(can't believe I'm still not done with this post...I will still be updating this one later...

Animating Puppet in After Effect

2008-12-31T22:19:00.001-05:00

The second assignment we got in digital compositing class was to animate a character with After Effect.
It was kind of like moving a puppet in it.
The character should be in silhouette only,
so it would look kind of like a shadow puppet.

This is the scene and character I designed

and a snap shot from the video

The hat on the girl’s head supposed to be a fish with lion’s head
(OMG that sounds like the Singapore Mer-Lion in Chinese style XDD)
To make this figure move,
I first drew every body part and the lanterns on separate layers in Illustrator.

Then imported all the layers into After Effect,
set up key frames, and adjusted each part separately.

Mondrian’s Work Animated

2008-12-27T23:57:00.000-05:00

The first day in digital compositing class,
we learned how to move shapes alone with a soundtrack.
With Piet Mondrian’s paintings as references,
we played with the lines and rectangular shapes around.
I chose this one to animated:

We didn't spent much time on that so the video was pretty short.
(not even to the main part haha)

It was quite fun.
(I love the music!)
The music is "Sing Sing Sing" by Benny Goodman & Gene Krupa

6-legged Walk Cycle

2008-12-25T23:29:00.000-05:00

*~*~MERRY CHRISTMAS~*~*

Such a good time to active my blog XD ha ha

It's winter vacation for me finally ~(*w*~)(~*w*)~

so now I have time to upload the works I've done in fall semester.

My Animation teacher gave the class an interesting start by making our first assignment a 6-legged walk cycle. As long as the thing has 6 legs and is walking, it doesn't have to be a living creature. (I loved somebody's idea of walking long sofa XD)

I wanted to create a shadowy monster that wares a paper mask as face, and there will be a Chinese character on its forehead.

I sketched out some ideas

(獅 is the Chinese character for LION;

狗 & 犬 are two ways of writing DOG)

and in the end I chose to do the giant dog.

Well, although it ended up doesn't take a dog form when I make it into animation ...

In this pencil test, the monster actually walked pretty funky because I made a mistake XD
I shouldn't have make all six legs the same pace since the back legs made smaller steps than the forelegs. The fact that those back legs would not be able to catch up with the front really bothered me.
So I fixed that when I made it into color version with background.
(made the back legs walked 2 times faster~)

I actually made it my assignment for digital compositing class when the teacher asked us to make a character hook up with a moving background XD