Muuuuuusic! Oh, and I have a website.

My website is now up, but still a work in progress.
http://www.ryanimationeff.com
Bio isn't there, the Other Work page is nonexistent, but hey it's something. Plus I'm gonna rethink text colors. But that all is for later.

I feel like putting some of my music up here for folks to have a listen. So I will.

All of this stuff was made in the last year or two, using my amp, a $20 mic plugged straight into my computer, and the program Reason for making drum/bass/keys parts. Most of these are recorded and mixed poorly, but I just make these for fun so no big deal there.

So a fairly simple one to start:

This was a sort of experiment recording clean guitar which i had issues with in the past. It also has a bit of acoustic guitar, and the not-too audible bass part is my acoustic pitched down an octave. I think the drums might be a bit overpowering, but I like to play along to this with distortion and it works quite well.

A quieter song:

Playing with recording acoustic guitar. All of this was written and recorded in like 20 minutes. The improv solo deal isn't too great though.

Something a bit heavier:

I wrote this song in sections over a good couple months in midi format, moved it into Reason about a year and a half ago, and recorded it last year. This is the best sound I got out of recording distorted guitar. I like this song for the way I played with time signatures and evolved the main riff. I'm not much of an improviser or big on solos so I focused on a melodic sort of rhythm.

A little bit of a song:

Just playing around with a piece of something I never put in a whole song. Distortion didn't record too well. I really have a thing for sus2 chords, and that is literally this entire piece. I also have a thing for 7/8 time signatures which it goes into at the end.


This is how the previous clip started out, before I added all the extra bits.

Most recent full song:

Really unhappy with the recording quality and mixing here, but I like the music. I wrote this in sections spread out over a few weeks this past summer. I played more with harmonies/multiple guitar parts than I usually do, which is nice. The piece goes a bit all over the place musically, but that's how a lot of my stuff turns out. I don't like to stay in one place too long. There's an improv solo bit at the end which is bleh, but whatever.



Here's a MIDI song (from Guitar Pro):

I really like this song because I played so much with polymeter, polyrhythm, and syncopation. Plus lots of sus2 chords make me happy. Never got around to actually recording this, next chance I have this will be what I work on. Also the part near the start where there are no drums, I kinda hate and never developed or replaced. Hopefully that will be fixed later.


And here's a song I wrote way back in late freshman year, in Reason (basically nicer sounding MIDI):

Not entirely finished but you get the idea. Starts out a lot mellower than my usual and picks up at the end. Don't have drums for the last bit, and mixing in that part is wonky. I'm rather fond of the strings part.


Not all of that is for everyone, I know, but it's how I like to spend some of my free time.

When you're a professional pirate, you don't have to wear a suit.

I'm waiting now for my website to get set up. Alex has all the basic coding done so all that needs to be done is for him to throw it on once hosting gets sorted out. (Refer to the first post for a look at the design) Just a matter of waiting now, but it should be up any day.

On a side note, I've been looking at this guy's work http://www.jefbertels.be/
It has a pretty awesome level of detail and is generally really weird. Kinda wish I could look at these images bigger though.

Click to view the whole thing, it won't let me resize so it's getting cut off.













He does the album artwork for the Ayreon albums:

-http://www.arjenlucassen.com/ayreon/ay_media/ay_images/ay_albums_y.jpg
-http://www.arjenlucassen.com/ayreon/ay_media/ay_images/ay_albums_the_01.jpg
-http://www.arjenlucassen.com/ayreon/ay_media/ay_images/ay_albums_um_01.jpg
-http://www.arjenlucassen.com/ayreon/ay_media/ay_images/ay_albums_itec_01.jpg



And since I just realized I don't have a link to it anywhere, here's the Vimeo link to our progress reel for the thesis:

No Strings Attached - Work Reel from Group of Six on Vimeo.

Not the most recent version, some animation and a fair bit of music has changed since this version I do believe.

I'll be making a post with a fair amount of content once I get a working website most likely.

(And the title of this post is because I've had that song from Muppet Treasure Island stuck in my head for a few days now.)

Adventures in Sleep Deprivation!

Well this week has been quite stressful, getting everything together for internship/job applications. Yesterday I sent out applications for Pixar, Disney, Blue Sky, and Insomniac Games because they were the most urgent.

I made snazzy little DVD boxes for my reels:With a copy of my resume on the back:
And finally learned what the LightScribe thing on my DVD drive does:

There's an updated version of my reel on Vimeo now (you can use the link in my last post)

And I made this for my friend Jeff's birthday in like 20 minutes earlier this week:
There is an actual story behind this.

Back in the dorms, I was playing Roller Coaster Tycoon and I made an prison island in the middle and filled it with about 100 of the "entertainer" employees that are dressed up as pandas. Every time the in-game date reached Jeff's birthday, I celebrated by gabbing one of the pandas and drowning him. (you know, that seems a little disturbing now that I think about it.) I think it may have started off as a way to bring Jeff down after getting so excited about his fake birthday, but it started a tradition. Since I didn't have Roller Coaster Tycoon this year, I decided to make a little drawing instead.


And one last thing, just a little animation I started work on about a week ago in what little free time I have. this is step-tangent blocking with plateau tangents thrown on to get a look at what's going on. This represents about 2 1/2 hours of work. A fluke crash stole about an hour of work where I blocked out part of Gabe's fall after the punch. I'm hoping to take that part fairly cartoony in the end.

Gabe and Dan Fight - WIP from Ryan Neff on Vimeo.

And that's that for now. Back to work for me.

Blog sounds funny.

Well, everyone's doing it, and I figure it would be a good thing to have now that I'm working on my portfolio site, so I made myself one of these blog things. I can't guarantee I'll be keeping up too well with this but I'll try.

Anyway, how about I throw my WIP demo reel up here so I can get me some comments.

Demo Reel 2010 from Ryan Neff on Vimeo.

It's very much a WIP, I sort of put the clips in the order I'd want but haven't settled on anything. Also, sound is weird in places and non-existent in others. I'm looking for comments about what order to put the shots in and which ones I should possibly remove. And anything else really, I need this done very very soon.


Also, a quick look at my portfolio website design! Aren't you lucky!



Click it to embiggify.

My roommate Alex Wright shall be helping me with the coding part of it.
If you can't tell already, I'm sticking to blues and greens for all my stuff.

So that's that, hopefully I'll keep up with this thing to make it interesting.