Earlier in the month I spent several days working on this zbrush sculpt of a young farm girl. I was using it to test-drive a lot of zbrush 42R’s new features so the work was slow and a tad frustrating as I had to make a couple of the elements twice before moving on. Now that I have a better grasp on the app I must say I love all of the new options and am really impressed with how much MORE I am able to do because of it.
By far the most difficult hurdle I had to overcome while sculpting this model was learning how to hold and feed a baby in one arm while rocking another in its cradle with my foot. I looked like one of those one man bands! It was a delicate four A.M. balancing act that if managed correctly would allow me one free hand to sculpt and an elbow to press all of my function keys! It was a rather funny setup but it worked.
We spell scouts S-C-O-U-U-T-S which makes us a completely different autonomous organization.
This was my masters thesis from USC Animation. It is an improvised comedy about the woes of scouting in the middle of urban Los Angeles. Scouuts came into being when I realized that my original thesis proposal was far to ambitious and needed to be scrapped. It was late in the semester and I needed something fast and so I turned to my best friend Devin Westberg, who just happened to be an improv comedian, for help. Devin gathered a talented group of friends from the Improv Olympic over in Hollywood and brought them down to the USC sound department for a two hour session in the recording booths. it was free form and fast and within an hour or so we had Cub Scouuts Pack 213 in the can. It was a bit to long so I cut the audio down a little which give it a bit more structure and punch and then spent the next two months animating.
For this project I did all the animation in Toon Boom Animation, which at the time was pretty new and was lightning fast compared to the tradition pencil and paper method. It allowed me to completely bypass a dozen steps and be one of only a hand full of students to finnish their thesis on time. The b&w vector art was then exported as an image sequence which I coloured in Photoshop and composited in final Cut Pro. This was a brave new digital world and compared to the three years it took me to make my earlier film this one only took five months start to finnish.
Improv by: Devin Westberg, Tom Warren, Jimmy Zerda, David Ury, Ben Tolpin
Directed, Animated and Produced by Sterling Sheehy
This project is dedicated to the memory of my friend Jimmy Zerda, who passed away not long after we made this film. He was the scouut with glasses, avery talented comedian and a friend. He will be missed.
