I have many images to upload that are long overdue. 

These were one of the series of illustrations done for the 2015 conference. 

More to follow. Oh by the way, happy holidays!

This is a small watercolor painting I did as a birthday gift to Steven. I know it looks random, but it basically represents one logo giving birth to another. (The orange being the company where Steven, Andy, and I first met, and the little gear wheel inside representing our current team logo.)

It's been such a long time since the last time I touched watercolor, or rather, any traditional medium at all. Working as a motion graphic artist, my job never requires me to draw anything traditionally. I do do some sketches occasionally, but even that's done on my Cintiq.

It only makes sense considering how convenient and time efficient digital painting is. 

I used to think back in college, painting digitally can never top using traditional mediums. I had some sort of pride about this, and it was almost an excuse for me not to learn to use photoshop or flash. I quickly realized not learning them was a big disadvantage, and decided to delve into it. 

Once I became comfortable painting digitally, I fell in love with it. 

I loved how easily I was able to reverse mistakes, and the choices of softwares I had for different types of artwork. Not getting any paint on my hand was also a plus. 

All my paint tubes, pencils and brushes rested somewhere deep in my drawer and never saw the light for years since then, until a few weeks ago, I took them out to work on this painting. 

From the first brush stroke to last, I was reminded how much I loved to paint traditionally. 

I loved mixing colors to get the color I want, using the right amount of water to get the opacity I want.. and the ability to zoom in closely and work on small details without seeing pixels.

I'm glad Steven asked me to do a painting because it woke up the artist in me. I still have a long way to go in terms of skills, but it really motivated me to paint more. In fact I've been watching watercolor tutorials for hours the past few days. I even ordered more paints and some brushes from online. Watercolor was something I always didn't feel confident using. (I mainly used acrylic) I loved the look of it, but didn't have the skill and knowledge to do it right. I plan to watch more tutorials and practice more, and hopefully I will have something worthy of sharing it here.

I have three mothers. Two in heaven, and one in Virginia. 

Despite unfortunate events, I always had a mother. I am so very lucky because of them.

Happy mothers day. 

So After about 3 years of working for at&t as a contractor, I got to start working as a full-time employee since February. This job is perfect for me because I get to work from home and work 4 days a week which allows me to dedicate some time for Idle Wheel. Another thing I love about this job is that I get to do lots of character animation which is what I've been wanting to, and trained to do. The orange character you see above is Murray, who I animate almost on a daily basis. Murray appears on many of their security campaign posters and videos, and these are two posters I created recently. 

Website headers

 This is also long overdue. I did some illustrations to be used as website headers for at&t.

I don't get asked to work on illustration jobs that often, but when I do, I have so much fun!

Sometimes I need a break from all those diamond keyframes you know...

Illustrations2

Some more sketches I did for the same project below

Illustrations

Not that anyone reads this but hope you are all enjoying the holidays!

These are some illustrations I did a long time ago for at&t.

I was given multiple topics related to cyber security, and was asked to do some illustrations with different styles and treatments. More to follow!

AT&T Cyber Security Conference Opening

090413 AT&T Conf Main Personal from Sun-Joon Robert Hwang on Vimeo.

Early sketches

Some modeling and rigging

About two months ago, I got to work on the opening animation for at&t cyber security conference with my friend Michael. This was an awesome experience because 1. it was one of the most exciting projects I got to work on this year, 2. because I enjoy working with Michael, 3. I got better at 3d animation.

Prior to this project, I barely knew how to animate anything in Cinema 4d, but with the help of Michael and numerous tutorials I watched, I can now say I know cinema 4d a little bit if someone asks... I'm still a newbie but I hope this is a stepping stone to exploring more 3d animation. 

Character Design Gig

First post this year!!

I love it when at&t gives me occasional character design/illustration gigs.

For this one, I was asked to design a simple character using a blobby shape. 

Hopefully I'll get to animate these guys.

Quickie 2

I know you do it.

Character Designs

Character designs done for at&t a while back.

And these are the animated clips before compositing. 

These were done a while ago, but I thought I'd post them since I don't have much recent work to share. College Board has been keeping me busy and I am mostly doing corporate style motion graphics. There are cons and pros. I definitely am hungry for some creative work though. 

iphone tracking

AccuApp_MockUp from Sun-Joon Robert Hwang on Vimeo.

This is a quick mockup video Steven and I created for a pitch, demonstrating how the Accuplacer app is used. We filmed my hands making motions on a blank screen then tracked it in Mocha. The content was created and animated in Aftereffects. Rotoscoping isn't perfect here, but this was a good practice, and I think we'll be able to make it look much better and nicer if we were to actually do this. Apple, let us create your next ipad demo video!!

Update

I was asked to come up with the whole design package for an online show at&t tech channel is hosting on their website, starting from a logo to the opening and layout formats.  The image above was the first draft I came up with that didn't get selected. Unfortunately I don't have a clean copy of the final design to post here because I created it using a plugin I don't own.
    Graphic design is always hard for me. The fact that I didn't have any official training makes me not confident. I'm glad I was given the opportunity to work on this though. It just brought something different to the table for me because most of the time, at&t hires me to do character animation. I will have to have better graphic design sense, since there will be many more like this to come when working for Idle Wheel Productions.

Puppet animation

This was a powerpoint presentation during a conference at at&t.
It was meant to be played in the background while a presenter was doing his presentation in the front.
My role was to do all the character animation, and the editor at at&t tech channel did all the background and special effects. I personally think it's a bit slow-paced and long, but since this is a background piece and has to be timed with the presentation itself, it works out okay.

College Board Project

 

So, I got to work on another College Board project, except this time they were my direct client! Thanks to Gloria Chen, me and my team Idle Wheel, were referred to College Board, and they hired us to work on the video content for their website. This was an overwhelming experience in a positive way, because this was our first paid gig ever, and the biggest client we ever had up until now. And through this, we officially registered our team as an LLC company. Thinking about the first day we met at Bite Asia Entertainment, and the days we spent working on free music video projects to build our portfolio, makes me feel proud that we stuck together this whole time, and that we are where we are right now.

 The project entailed interviewing professors and college board staffs about their College Level Examination Program(CLEP) at a conference in San Diego, and making different cuts of videos for different purposes. The thumbnails above are from the video we made for the social media purpose that will be posted on their youtube account.

It was pretty draining to work on this and work for at&t at the same time, but it was totally worth it and time well-spent.  I hope this will lead to more projects and that Idle Wheel will continue on!

It's been a year

Last year today, 

I was holding her hand saying my last goodbyes.

작년오늘, 

엄마손을 잡고 마지막을 지켜보았다.

벌써일년이란 시간이 지났구나.

엄마에게 자랑스러운 아들이 되고싶은데 

그렇지 못하게 살고있는거 같아 죄송스럽다.

My thoughts are still with you always

Zero

It's been almost a month since I moved out and started living alone, but for some reason it still doesn't feel like I'm living alone. May be because I was too busy working and unpacking that I didn't have the time to let it sink in. Or may be it's because Zero always makes sure to greet me home when I get home.

The Proposal

So about a month ago, Steven's good friend Billy needed help creating a proposal DVD that he wanted to use while proposing to his girlfriend. I was asked to work on the first part of the video (their first date), while Steven worked on the rest. I tried to go for a simple, paper cut-out like style and I'm happy with how it turned out considering that I rushed through it at the end. I don't want to post the entire video, so here are some screen shots of the part I worked on.

Rotoscope Project

Finally I can share with you one of the projects I did for at&t! Usually they don't let me share any of the work I do for them, but I was glad to find this on their website. :) This was all rotoscoped, meaning traced frame by frame from a live action footage. Then I replaced the backgrounds and added in all the graphic animation. The process was a bit tedious, but watching it now on their website makes me feel it was all worth it :D

Hope you all enjoy!

quickie

Something I do all the time