Art Of Karen Trieu

New Reel 2011

2011-08-09T00:33:00.000-07:00

Karen.Trieu.demo.2011 from Karen Trieu on Vimeo.

My latest and greatest from my recent project at Sony Imageworks; "The Smurfs", along with some other animation mentor stuff.

Dialogue - so I still want you

2010-03-20T22:02:00.000-07:00

Term 05 is pretty much at its end! This is my latest dialogue piece. I had a lotta fun doing this one -- a mix of acting and body mechanics and tried out some more cartoony animation. Hope you all like it =)

Dialogue - so i still want you from Karen Trieu on Vimeo.

Dinos!

2010-03-06T20:15:00.001-08:00

some dino designs i did for some buttons made by Amy Lee! =)
She makes all kinds of buttons...check it out:
CunningandCrafty

Happy birthday best friend!

2010-02-27T09:35:00.000-08:00

Monologue

2010-02-22T07:04:00.000-08:00

Here it is! 7 weeks worth of AM woooork!!

Monologue - so dumb from Karen Trieu on Vimeo.

Term 3 - Progress Reel

2009-09-18T23:19:00.000-07:00

All my hard work, blood and sweat for term 3. I learned a lot this terming, pushing myself outside of my comfort zone. I think I got a better grasp on this whole cartoony style of animating. Lots more to learn of course. Stay tuned!

Term 3 - Assignment #3

2009-08-16T10:09:00.000-07:00

Anim Jam #3 - Chase n Fall

Tailor enters screen right, skipping over stones getting to the other side of the stream. Stewie tries to chase after tailor but gets ahead of himself, slips on the stones and falls flat on his face! I'm going to continue to experiment with exaggeration and try to keep a consistent cartoony feel with this one as well to hook up with my previous assignment.

Planning

Term 3 - Assignment #2

2009-08-16T09:58:00.000-07:00

Anim Jam #2 - Sneak and Chase

Second shot of the Animation Jam. I have stewie come out of his axing action and notices tailor come into screen..sneaks up behind him and tries to swipe/grab him. This one was a fun and challenging piece. I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and try some more exaggerated and cartoony takes with a character. I think it worked out ok and learned quite a bit out of it.

Planning

Polish

Term 3 - Assignment #1

2009-08-16T08:57:00.000-07:00

Term 3 - Advanced Body Mechanics
Mentor: Drew Adams

Term 3 has begun and is going by really quick! I've been really busy and haven't had time to update. This term we get to choose a theme and hook up all our assignments together...but here it is planning and animation for the first assignment.

Anim Jam #1 - Chopping Wood

Planning

Polish

Term 2 - Assignment #3

2009-06-23T21:00:00.000-07:00

DANCE! DANCE! DANCE! - I wanted to do dance cause I found a really cool hip hop clip and thought it'd be challenging. It was nothing like animating on Backyardigans... although having worked on that show did help. I followed the traditional approach of doing key poses, then breakdowns and then inbetweens for this assignment. I'd say it turned out pretty well. I think I'm still a fan of keying poses as opposed to the layered approach.

Planning

Blocking

Polish

Term 2 - Assignment #2

2009-06-23T20:23:00.000-07:00

NINJARIFIC! - I learnt a lot doing this assignment. I was comfortable enough to try something a little different and go outside of my comfort zone. Light bulbs starting going off going into this assignment and I started to see basic principles of animation in a new perspective and with more understanding. For example, seeing squashing and stretching within the whole character rather than one particular body part - and is what I experimented with this assignment.

Planning

Blocking

Polish

2009-05-03T09:56:00.000-07:00

Hello boys and girls!

Yeah its been a while since I've updated.. doing work, freelance and AM proves to be a mighty task to handle!! Freelance work is ALMOST done.. I'll be posting some artwork from that shortly. For now here's what I've been up to!

Term 2 - Psychology of Body Mechanics
Mentor: Boola Robello

There were a list of things we could do, I chose Ballie walking and running back up there stairs. The assignment was broken down into four parts:

Planning

Blocking

Refining and then Polish

I had audio initially in my blocking stage, but as I got to the final stage, it worked well without it and decided to take it out! It was my first time that I had planned out an entire shot in such detail from doing sketches/thumbnails and working out timing before going into Maya. I'd have to say it helped out big time..it really cuts out all the guess work in 3D and getting a better sense of timing, breakdowns and inbetweens. So that was my process for the first assignment and I'm learning tons!

A big thanks to Steve Wigmore for helping me with lighting and showing me the ways of a better pipeline for my work.

AM - Term 1 - Progress Reel

2009-03-28T22:09:00.000-07:00

Hey guys, Term one is finally done! on to term two! This is a compilation of all the assignments that was done for term one.

AM - 110

2009-03-15T19:54:00.000-07:00

Only 2 more weeks to go! I can't believe its already
Week 10!! ..onto "Personality Walk"..I wanted
to keep things simple..but like always, I ended
up over complicating things and added extra stuff
that I probably didn't have to.. like him slipping
and sliding..I was having a lotta trouble with the
mechanics of the body and knowing how it should
look when someone slips on ice! This is what I ended
up with...still a lot more tweakin to go..

This weeks pose is EXHAUSTION. I ended up
choosing the one on the right wasn't too
difficult with this one I found...as I was feeling
like this for the past week with my assignments,
and juggling with work and freelance!!..its been
neverending...

AM - 109

2009-03-15T19:45:00.000-07:00

Icce Icce baby...

This week's pose was CONCERN..poses seem
to get harder and harder.. the difficulty in this
one was to not make it look like it was
DEVASTATED (which was week 5's pose) .. I
did two that I liked and couldn't decide which to
choose

.. I ended up going with number 6...

AM - 108

2009-03-15T19:27:00.000-07:00

The walk cycle begins!!!! Agh I was kinda dredding
this week's assignment..cause I hate doing walk
cycles.. they're hard..but it was good to revisit the
basics of a walk and really figuring the mechanics of
it that make a walk read well.. this is the blocking
part of a "Vanilla Walk"..

This weeks pose was STRENGTH.. was hard to figure out
what kinds of poses demonstrated strength without using
the cliche poses of lifting a heavy box or pushing something..
So I looked up poses that would involve using your whole body
for the use of strength.. boxing didn't quite work because its hard
to show strength in motion.. gravity and force could play a big
part and isn't necessarily 100% true strength.. Gymnastic poses
seemed to work well where full body strength is used to lift one's
self up

AM - 107

2009-03-15T19:12:00.000-07:00

Week 7's assignment was more overlapping action..
This time using tailor.. trying to think about offset
timing in jumps and making those overlaps work
with each successive jump..

AM - 106

2009-03-15T19:01:00.000-07:00

Finally updating again..this was week 6's assignment
THE PENDULUM!!...dealing with overlap action and
such..tried to add a little story or character to the
pendulum and ball..

AM - 105

2009-02-13T21:06:00.001-08:00

Week 5!! This weeks assignment was do do a
bouncing ball in an obstacle course..emphasis is
on squash and stretch!

This weeks pose is "devastation".. this one was
a tough one to do without it looking TOO cliche..
Chose number 10...

AM - 104

2009-02-13T20:58:00.000-08:00

This is week 4's assignment where we had to
animate a really heavy ball and a really light
ball.. I guess mines are more like bowling ball
and beach ball...

AM - 103

2009-02-13T20:45:00.000-08:00

This is third week into AM. Bouncing ball was our first Anim assignment.. and this weeks pose was excitement! Was pretty hard nailing "excitement" because a pose can be determined or expressed in so many different ways..some can look anticipating excitement, or happy excitement or proud excitement....guess it was hard cause there' no context. Anyway this is what I pulled off.. chose lucky number 7...

AM - 102

2009-02-13T20:33:00.001-08:00

So this is the pose i decided to do for my first assignment..it was based off my subway sketches I did there.. practicing with the rigs...

Subway Drawings

2009-01-14T17:48:00.000-08:00

So I've started taking Animation Mentor and our first assignment was to go somewhere and draw some people as you see them and then go back and pose them out with a rigged character that they've provided. I Haven't cafe'd in a while..so I was doing these to get the feel of drawing from life again. After doing these for the past 3 days, a light bulb went off and I realized that I was looking at it from a different perspective because I was keeping in mind.. "what would make a good pose". Now it seems that I'm thinking about where the head is tilting? where is the weight distributed? what are the hands doing? where are the feet pointing? what story is being told in this pose?..weird how these things never really came into play until this assignment..maybe it was subconcious. Now I'm just concious of it. So keep that in mind. Enjoy.. I'll be posting more I'm sure.

Demo.2008

2009-01-01T14:11:00.000-08:00

My most recent Demo Reel, most of the work was done for a show called "Planet Sketch"

Wedding Animation

2009-01-01T13:57:00.000-08:00

This is a wedding animation I did in Flash for a couple. I storyboarded and designed all the characters and layout.

Christmas Cards!

2009-01-01T13:52:00.000-08:00

Girls

2009-01-01T13:50:00.000-08:00

Its a...rock!

2009-01-01T13:44:00.000-08:00

2009-01-01T13:37:00.000-08:00

Yay I finally put together some stuff to post on my blog.. theres not much to post..but here are some stuff i did throughout 2008 starting with some 3D stuff I modeled and lit in Maya. Hopefully I'll be more frequent with my posts for 2009! As always comments and critques are welcomed! Enjoy!