Introduction

Hi everybody!

I'm Joe Choe, the name rhymes. I'm from Fullerton, CA, and Los Angeles, CA, hopping between the two when I was younger. I moved to Austin in 2004, lived in San Antonio for a year in 2005. I commuted to school in San Antonio for another semester after that while working in Austin and eventually transferred to UT.

The reason I'm taking Visual Effects and Motion Graphics is because since I was little, I was always fascinated with media dealing with the subject. Being an avid videogame player, I dip back and forth between the worlds of videogames and film.

Having taken Geoff Marslett's animation class, I wanted to learn more about after effects and having heard good things about this class, I decided to take it.

I guess the one thing I'm interested in as of right now is how 2-d videogaming is progressing in the HD era and whether or not those techniques can actually be carried over to film and/or animation. For example, several 2-d fighting games such as Street Fighter IV, King of Fighters, and especially Blazblue are now incorporating new styles into their art to keep up with the times, leading to harsh changes to their visual core in order to remain relevant. The interesting aspect of this is the fact that they chose to keep the games on a 2-d plane because it's been proven that the fanbases for these specific franchises detest the 3-d versions that were played around with in the previous generation of videogaming.

However, instead of it being a pure 2-d, what they are doing now to create HD sprites as I understand it, is to create a 3-d model and then essentially rotoscope it(don't really know the specifics of it). Although this process is not that new, the look has evolved to a point where it looks absolutely gorgeous. According to the makers of Blazblue, the difference between their game and other fighting games is the fact that they hand-drew over the 3-d models to add in their own little touches. That piqued my interest as I really like rotoscoping and want to find new ways of doing so.

I don't expect to do 3-d in this class, but I think that learning a bit more on how to use after effects will allow me to move on to other programs and learn them a bit easier.

That's about it for what I am interested in at the moment, although... when I really think about it, I'm interested in all of it. So, I can't really say "this or that."

About me personally... although I wrote a little about where I lived... more in terms of my background in rtf.

Don't let the grammar in this blog-post fool you. I'm essentially a writer. I started writing novels in the 8th grade. As for film, I made my first really stupid film when I was 13 on a really cheap VHS camera. I taught myself how to write screenplays when I was 15 with one of my friends who is now a creative writing major in California. My family has a long-standing history of being involved in an entertainment sort of field. Both of my parents were musicians, my cousin was a stage-actor in California(now training to be a doctor), my other cousin is an editor in California, and the two cousins' brother is in the Korean mafia, supposedly.(I saw him with a rather large Asian entourage at one of my cousin's weddings and he just popped 500 dollars into my hand when I was nine).

The first "bigger film" I was in was in my junior year of college where I did some stuntwork aka getting hit by a car over and over again as an indie filmmaker kept complaining about how it wasn't looking real. Ironically, it was my car(the amazing 1987 camry).

Up to that point in my life, I had done no stuntwork so yeah... I was scared about dying.

That same year, I would get punched hard in the face after badly mischoreographing an action sequence. It was an experience. A bad one, but still an experience.

For those of you who ever wonder "what" I am, I am technically Korean. I don't want to get into specifics of "but I'm part this and part that" so it's just more convenient to say that since that's what I dominantly look like. However, I was born in Rockville, Maryland, and can't speak Korean fluently (I know nothing of Korean culture, so yeah, don't ask me questions about it). Ironically, I speak English, Spanish, a little Japanese, a little Korean, really basic French, and that's it.

And if you've read up to this point, yes, I am writing this much because I'm bored while at school and kind of sick, having been stuck in traffic for an hour and a half and missing my first class of the day. I just took a nap in the library and woke up with chills, not a good sign.

See you all in class!

-Joe Choe