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  • July29th

    New Project

    Posted in: Art, Projects

    For a while now I’ve been thinking of a project to foster my creativity. I never really felt like I had the opportunity to do so before, especially with school being in the way. It’s not going to help that I’d be starting graduate school this fall or spring, but if I keep delaying, then it’ll never get done.

    I’ve resolved myself into making a 3D animated short to tie music and art together. I’m deciding on 3D modeling because it inevitably has to incorporate 2D art, and that only recently did I find out that I’m pretty good with 3D modelling. (A side project with CATIA training at work turned out to be of an artistic marvel.)

    A couple months ago for Sean’s projects in game development, I sketched him a cat, though I wouldn’t mind making and using it in the animation. As a for fun thing last night, I challenged myself to a “Time Attack” challenge where I produced one sketch a minute for five minutes of the cat:

    Without a storyline, it’s hard to determine if this little guy would end up in the final product, but he’s at least a start to character design to get the ball rolling.

    I plan to use the open-source software, Blender, for my 3D models. I haven’t decided yet if I want to use it on my laptop or desktop, or Linux or Windows. It shouldn’t matter too much, though. As a method of learning I’m going to try and model WALL-E in Blender, since I’ve found that working on something by scratch, versus going by step-by-step tutorials, is the best way for me to learn. I bought a manual on Blender recently and have flipped through it a little, but I know that it’s soon time to work on it!

    I imagine that with a project this big it would probably take me about 1-2 years to develop, but that’s alright. All great works have to start somewhere, and I’m already looking forward to the finished product.

  • July25th

    Traverse Town (2008)

    Posted in: Music, Portfolio

    Song title: Traverse Town
    Arranged by: Charlene Valerio
    Original artist: Yoko Shimomura
    Instruments: Live! Grand Piano, Sweet! Soprano Saxophone, Acoustic Bass, and Drum Kit: Standard Kit 1
    Listen:

    Right-click to download:Charlene Valerio – Traverse Town (Cover)

    This is originally a song from the game, Kingdom Hearts, that I really enjoy listening to especially when I’m relaxing, so I decided to cover the song as a basis for learning how to mix and arrange instruments on my keyboard that were beyond just the Live! Grand Piano.

    I’m not particularly too fond of the piano and bass combination, but somehow that got resolved with some recording issues Audacity had. For some reason, Audacity was having some issues recording the bass track into my laptop, and even when it did, the bass came out a bit faint. Increasing the gain or amplifying it didn’t help too much either. So you don’t hear it very much compared to the recording on the keyboard, but it’s still there.

    I kind of tapped out the cymbal on the keyboard very much like how one would tap out DDR/ITG steps idly. It’s kind of embarrassing to admit, but as I was recording I was visualizing red, blue, and purple arrows. Specifically, right arrows for some unknown reason.

    I think it came out pretty well considering that I’ve done it from scratch. I’ve kind of been doing this on the side in-between class. It’s not as exact to the original as I would have liked it to be, but it’s okay.

  • July25th

    The Sad Song of Work (2008)

    Posted in: Music, Portfolio

    Song title: Improv 2008-04-16 — The Sad Song of Work
    Composed/Arranged by: Charlene Valerio
    Instruments: Live! Grand Piano, Acoustic Bass, Sweet Heaven
    Drum Style: Piano Ballad
    Listen:

    Right click to download: Charlene Valerio – The Sad Song of Work (Improv)

    I came home from school really tired and upset one day, mostly from the fact that I was at school nearly all day and besides going to class, I didn’t get much work done.

    At all.

    To take a break, I plopped on the keyboard. I was trying to play perk me up songs like Belle, or even some sort of song from Pirates of the Caribbean that’s invigorating to play, but nothing was really helping my mood. So, I ended up messing around with random keys I don’t normally play much, which is pretty much anything other than C!

    I don’t really know how it happened, but I ended up with something I just had to record. I guess the minor tones are in part based on how I was feeling this whole day. It conveys my sadness of work. :P

    Of course, this doesn’t help that I have other more important things to do, but somehow I was able to put this all together, including recording it onto my laptop, in less than 30 minutes(?!) which was also pretty surprising.

    Since I did this all so quickly, I didn’t really spend much time in enhancing it with Audacity. That means, there’s still a bit of noise because I didn’t perform a noise removal and I didn’t record the instruments to separate tracks and just recorded it all in one. Oh well.

  • July25th

    Still Alive (2008) (piano cover, short)

    Posted in: Music, Portfolio

    Song title: Still Alive (piano cover, short)
    Arranged by: Charlene Valerio
    Original artist: Jonathan Coulton
    Instruments: Live! Grand Piano
    Listen:

    Right-click to download: Charlene Valerio – Still Alive (piano cover, short)

    After I was able to figure out the melody and chords for Still Alive, I recorded it so that I could reference it for later when I would actually go back and redo the song using similar instruments that were used in the original song. I didn’t want to notate it because I remember doing this during a busy schoolweek, so I recorded it playing it slowly and “stretching” the chords out into arpeggios in the beginning so that it’d be easy for me to remember how to play it if I did end up forgetting.

    The other version of Still Alive with the guitar, drums, and other instrumentals is set on the back burner for now where it’s “done” but not yet “done-done”, if that makes any sense.

    This is a song that was made famous after the release of Valve’s Portal. I would recommend the as its concept is simple, though it leads itself into some complex puzzles. Though, there is a little bit of a storyline to it, so I wouldn’t recommend listening to the actual version of the song because its lyrics give away a little bit of spoilers.

  • July24th

    Under Construction

    Posted in: Website

    Well, after months — maybe years even — of wanting to setup a website for my portfolio, projects, and engineering shenannigans, I’ve finally done so.

    As you can tell, this site is still very much in the works. Here’s my to-do list so far:

    • Setup domain/DNS (7/25/2008)
    • Gather content for my Portfolio page from both laptop and computer
    • Update About section; maybe find pics to post? (7/24/2008)
    • Update resume (7/26/2008)
    • After content established, completely overhaul CSS design (current one is temporary)

    ———-
    7/26/2008 Update:

    Well, I have a bit more content up now. There’s still a lot of browsing around to do for gathering and organizing things into my portfolio. In regards to my Resume and About section, I feel as if they’re rough drafts, and at this moment after looking over and proofreading my work, I can’t seem to catch typos and errors when in my gut I feel like there are.

    There’s still much work to do, but as it is right now, it’s starting to look more solid, which I am thankful for.

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