I'm tour guide Barbie

Just wanted to give a quick tour to everyone who hasn't been to our house yet. Sorry about the crappy quality, we think we figured out why and won't let it happen again!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhNJFWRGY8g

YouTubedy

Dave talks Youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSJzW1YnTm0

Crazy Day!

So today gave me a little scare, but then I suppose I was a little relieved. If we were going to have our car broken into down here, I'm glad all the thieves took was a lousy GPS and not the whole darn car.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5XY7oJH6Dw

Scraps

Sorry, this is a long one. Sometimes I ramble. But I hope you enjoy it anyway!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36h28yDNJ4M

Ice Cream Scream

After a trip all over town looking for a Ben & Jerry's to get our free ice cream today, we discovered that the store was closed! What an awful thing to happen to a girl (and her husband who has to deal with her)! Being denied free ice cream is not a pleasant thing, but luckily I have an amazing husband who stops at the grocery store to buy me a whole big thing of ice cream to soothe my pain without even having to ask. How lucky I am...(well, not with ice cream apparently, but with spouses)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuDMR3-vysw

At the bookstore

It was a good evening tonight, for we got to go to a local Barnes & Noble and see Brandon Sanderson, author extrodinaire, and get our books scribbled in. We sat in on some good question and answerage, as well as a couple read-ins for forthcoming works of art. Indulge in our experiences:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW_30OJOA1E

Relief Society Meetings

So we created this video because we skyped my parents tonight and told them about our day at church, and they thought it was outlandish that the Relief Society would have a party during the Sunday Block and that it would never happen in Utah. So we thought we would ask the great interwebs and see what others thought.

Tell us what you think.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7H8WuelNG8

Day at the Beach?

So I thought I would start vlogging things as they happen to us. I didn't bother to tell Kelly, which explains the weird look she gives me at the beginning of the video. Enjoy!

March so far...

March has been pretty interesting but still laid back month for us here in Encino. Dave has been busy with his secret side job (I'm not sure that I'm allowed to say what his job is). Last week he had to work this job, and I went with him. It was at the UCLA campus, which is absolutely gorgeous!! I totally fell in love with campus. Around every corner I would point and yell at Dave "Look at that!!" I'm sure he was bored with me by the end of our walk around there. We both practiced our photography skills while we were there. We had a nice little picnic on one of the beautiful lawns and enjoyed the perfect weather. It was a wonderful day.

With the Bruin Bear

He didn't like Dave very much

Awesomeness

So cool (and not just the girl doing the handstand)
Who wouldn't want to go to school here?
I mean, look at how beautiful their library is
I'm seriously so jealous and so in love with UCLA

I'm sure most of you wouldn't be able to tell, but spring has sprung here in California. The weather is getting a lot warmer, and there is a distinct change in the air that Dave and I can both feel. The flowers are starting to bloom and it smells so wonderful when I go running in the fancy neighborhood behind us. I love spring!

One bad thing that happened to us was my desktop computer dieing. I bought the computer new in summer of 2008 and the motherboard decided to die last week. We looked on HP's website and apparently this is a common problem for that model of computer; a lot of people who bought it the same time I did had it die at the same time also. It's so sad. Luckily my hard drive is fine though, so we will be able to save all my files. And thank goodness that we have Dave's laptop to use also. I don't know what I would do all day without the internet.

We are patiently but anxiously awaiting our tax refund from Uncle Sam. We had an uncommon form I guess, so we had to mail our return in rather than file it electronically, and they are still processing. Because of all the things we did this year, the main one being a first time home buyer, we are getting quite a refund and are ready to go shopping! Hopefully any day now it will come and we can pay off our debt and buy some fun things.

Yesterday I had a fun blast from the past. My good friend Shannon from Imlay City, Michigan (which is where I mostly grew up, for those of you who may not have known), came to California for a visit. She's a super genius, so she was out here visiting Cal Tech for grad school. I haven't seen her since the summer of 2005 I believe, so it was awesome to be able to catch up with her and enjoy the sunshine. It was a great day and made me miss all my friends in Michigan.

Until next time...

Update

I suppose I should stop slacking and finally update this blog. No too much has happened in the past few months tho. David and I went to Utah for Christmas. I got to go a few days and early and see one of my best friends get married. It was awesome, so cool to go to some one's temple sealing. I loved it.

We spent Christmas morning with Dave's family and the afternoon with my sister and her family. Dave's brother William got to go to the temple for his endowments while we were there, and that was another awesome experience. All his brothers and sisters were there in Utah for Christmas and the temple, so it was really fun. William gave his mission farewell talk while we were there too. He went into the MTC on January 20th and is now serving in the Everett Washington Mission. It's cool to have a family member on a mission; this is a first for me.

Since I couldn't get any financial aid this semester, I'm just working on some Independent Study classes. Slowly but surely I'm moving along. The deadline is so far away that I sometimes lack motivation. I've had a wrench thrown in my graduation plans when Independent Study decided to stop offering 3 classes that I needed. Right now it looks like I will be going CSULA for their spring term and taking a few classes, and then I will be back on track to go back to BYU in the fall and graduate. I'm ready to be done with school, although entering the work force does scare me a little bit. Hopefully I can find an internship this summer to ease some of that apprehension and really get my foot into the engineering community.

So since I just sit around the house all day now, I decided to start exercising before I get heart disease or something. Right now my goal is just 30 minutes of exercise at least 3 times I week, so I've been going running. I sort of have a love/hate relationship with running, sometimes I love it and sometimes I loathe it. Right now I'm loving it; it's actually been fun. I still stink at it, I can barely run a mile and that takes me 15 minutes, but I want to get better, and I will.

This last week or so we've been having issues with water. Water has been dripping from our ceiling and luckily into our bathtub. We talked to the neighbors on the second floor, and they were getting ready to call a plumber, but the next day their ceiling started leaking too, so we discovered the leak was coming from the 3rd floor. The guy up there has to work all week, so we had to wait until the weekend for a plumber to come. In the meantime we had our water on that side of the condo turned off. Luckily we have 2 bathrooms and were still able to shower. The leak is fixed now, and an inspector from his insurance company came today to look at our damage. We have some problems, and most of them are from mold. In the closet next to the bathroom there is a hole cut in the wall for our jacuzzi tub, and boy does it stink under there. Water was dripping down there the whole times and the mold has been loving it. Our ceiling is still wet too, and our wall is discolored. Hopefully the guy's insurance will pay for all the repairs that we need, and hopefully they will be repaired soon. I can't wait until we have our own house and we're responsible for our own problems.

Since this is finally the last season of Lost, David decided it was time for him to watch it. I've seen the first 3 seasons and loved them, so I'm excited to watch it too. We kind of "marathoned" the first season, but we're going slower with season 2. Dave figured that if we watch 1 episode a day we will be all caught up when this last season ends. Dave's really loving it so far I think. He's always ready to watch the next episode.

We found out this week that the awesome organ-playing Elder in our ward is finally getting transferred after 8 months. He was a great missionary and we'll miss him, and he was an amazing organ player. Unfortunately, our ward is lacking in pianists and I'm apparently next on the list. I was getting comfortable with the primary songs, but now I'll have to get comfortable with the hymns. I'm not officially called yet, but most likely I'll be having a chat with the bishopric next Sunday. Its bad enough to have me play, but my ward will be doubly disappointed after having an organ performance major playing for the last 8 months. Sunday should be pretty interesting.

Dave's job is going well. He finished up Cats & Dogs 2 in December and is now on the development team, still at Sony. This means he helps make tools and scripts for the computer programs at work. He really likes it and says its where he wants to be. Last week and today he's been carpooling with a guy in our ward who also works at Sony, although at a building down the street. I think they're having fun together. It saves them time on the way to work, and hopefully we will enjoy the savings soon.

That's all I can think of that has happened recently. I'll try to update this more as things happen, especially since it's not like I'm too busy to do this. But for now, ciao!

Post-Christmas Card

This year has been a year of change for the Dunns. In fact, this year saw the creation of the Dunns. David and Kelly were engaged in March and wed on July 3rd, 2009 in the Salt Lake Temple. They are so happy to be married and to start this new family. Shortly after their honeymoon (a cruise around the Caribbean), they moved Kelly down to Los Angeles from Provo, UT. In September, the couple was able to purchase a condominium in Encino where they are currently living.
Kelly is still attending BYU to obtain her degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering. Currently she is taking some Independent Study classes and will return to BYU next fall to finish her last semester and graduate. After moving to California, she was called as the Primary Pianist in her church ward. Her piano skills have improved greatly since then. Currently, she works part time at Downtown On Ice, an outdoor ice rink in the middle of Los Angeles. She works in the skate shop handing out ice skates. She has recently rekindled her love of reading, and loves to snuggle up with her wonderful husband.
David graduated from BYU in April with a BFA in Animation. In March, he moved to Los Angeles to work at Sony Imageworks. Until about 2 weeks ago, he was working on the movie Cats and Dogs 2. He’s not sure what movie he will be working on next. Shortly after Kelly was called into primary, David was too. He was called as the CTR teacher and wrangles a wild bunch of kids every week.
We hope everyone is doing well and had as a great a year as we did. From sunny California we’d just like to say Merry Christmas!

Thanksgiving and Such

So this Thanksgiving was mine and Dave's first one together. Thanksgiving season also marks the anniversary of our first date. So it was a very happy weekend. We went over the Nah's house for dinner, who are some of our friends in the ward. It was delicious, I love thanksgiving food.

On Friday, I had to work all morning. Dave spent his day at the verizon store, checking out new phone plans for us. He took me back there after work, and we got our new phones. He got the new Droid and loves it. He's turning into a phone junkie now. I got a Chocolate Touch, and its pretty great. I'm mostly happy that I now have a California phone number and that I actually get reception in my house now.

After getting the phones, we left on our first camping trip together. We left kind of late, so we drove a few hours up the California Coast, found a camping spot near the beach and spent the night. It was super windy, and we couldn't get our stakes in the ground, so the tent was blowing everywhere. It wasn't a very pleasant night. In the morning, we drove a few more hours up the coast to Big Sur and camped there. This was a much nicer campsite: it was right next to the river, had lots of trees, and we could get our tent stakes in the ground. So we spent the night there, had smores and whatnot. It was fun.

We drove back on Sunday, but we stopped a few places on the way. We stopped at a really cool beach with big rocks and big waves and took tons of pictures. We also stopped to see the Elephant Seals lounging on the beach. They were big and fat and lazy, but still cool to see. It was like going to the zoo, but in the wild. The seals were near Hearst Castle, which we stopped at the visitors center for on the way up. W.W. Hearst built a huge mansion up on top of on of the hills. The tickets were ridiculously expensive, so we just looked at pictures in the visitors center. It looked pretty extravagant and we got a lot of ideas for our dream home. The drive itself was beautiful. We had a great weekend.

Sister Visit and Update

So about 2 weeks ago my big sister Tracy drove down from Utah with her kids to visit us in our new house. It was tons of fun and so great to have family visit.

We had lunch with Marcy Jackson, who was a good friend way back in Michigan, so that was super fun.

We also spent a day at the beach. The kids had never been to a real beach before. Kenny kept saying "We don't need to go to the beach, we can just pretend." We had to make them go. But once they got there, they really enjoyed playing in the sand.

In other news, Dave's dad got called as Bishop in his home ward last Sunday, so we flew up to Utah to share in the joy. It was an awesome experience. All of Dave's siblings except his brother in Texas, Dave's grandparents, and his Aunt and Uncle all came to church on Sunday. We got to sit in on the blessings afterward and the spirit was so strong. It was such a testimony builder. We had so much fun visiting with his family afterward. (We also stopped in to see Tracy and return a Go Fish fish she left in California). It was a super fun weekend.

Before we went to Utah, I had a job interview at an outdoor ice rink right in the downtown of LA, and yesterday I found out I got the job! I think it will be really fun and will help me remember more that the holidays are approaching. Sometimes here in sunny California I forget that it's fall, although the weather has been quite a bit cooler recently (cooler as in 70's instead of 90's). Anyway, I'm glad I finally found a job, even if it just seasonal. I've been looking since we moved here, so even a small success seems big. Hopefully now we can afford a few extra things, like a dining room table, and paying off credit cards/student loans sooner.

That's the latest in the life of the Dunn's. More to come soon.

Halloween

So not much happened this Halloween. It was probably the least I'd ever done for the holiday, but it was still great and I had fun. Our ward had a Halloween trunk or treat party a few weeks back that we went too, that was pretty much it. We didn't get any decorations for our condo. We didn't even carve pumpkins, which I really wanted to do after I found out that Dave has never carved a pumpkin in his entire life! My family always got pumpkins for all of us kids and we each did our own, but I guess in Dave's family they just got one pumpkin and his mom carved it every year. Next year that is definitely on the to do list for Halloween. You haven't lived until you've carved a pumpkin. Our HOA didn't open our front doors, so we couldn't get any trick-or-treaters this year. Dave and I dressed up just for each other, watched some old tv shows and ate the candy that was supposed to be for the kids. It was pretty great. It was weird having 90 degree weather on Halloween. In Michigan (where I grew up) we'd sometimes get snow on that day. Crazy. Anyway, that's our Halloween update. I hope you all had a spooky time!

Blog Steal!

So, my friend Kristi told me when Dave and I were engaged that we have start a blog when we got married, all married people do it. I thought that was pretty silly, I barely knew anyone with a blog, but then all my friends got married this summer and I discovered she was right! All married people do have blogs. And since David doesn't use this anymore really and I'm too lazy to start my own, I stole this one. So this is our new family blog. I have no idea how to use it really, except to post this, but hopefully I will figure more stuff out soon.

Anyway, let me give you an update. David and I got married July 3rd, 2009 at the Salt Lake City Temple. It was probably the best day of my life, and definitely the best day of Dave's; ok definitely mine too.

For our honeymoon, we took a cruise to the Cayman Islands, Roatan Honduras, Belize, and Mexico. It was tons of fun! This picture is at some Mayan Ruins in Mexico.

After that we moved me from Utah to California. Dave had been living down here for several months before we got married, and I finally got to join him. We bounced around a few places in LA but we're finally settled in our new condominium in Encino. It's pretty great, except we still have boxes of stuff to unpack. Good thing we have a second bedroom to hide all our mess. Married life is pretty great, for me at least. I'm sure Dave thinks so too. How could living with me be anything but great? Anyway, I recommend getting married to everyone: you'll really enjoy it. That's really all I wanted to say today. Stay tuned for more...

Summer Already!

I thought I should start my summer off with a bang. To that effect I took a trip down to Zion National Park where I spent a day and a half wandering the park taking photos and drawing sketches as my whim took me. In one day, I figured I hiked over 9 miles, and one of those hikes was the craziest, but funnest hike I have ever done. For those of you who know it, its called Angels Landing. For those of you who don't, its only a 2.5 mile trail, but you climb about half a vertical mile and the last half mile is just you the sandstone trail, some chains to help you out and two sheer cliffs on either side. Some crazy stuff there. I think they said that on average 2 people die every year on this trail, but that could just be imagining things. It did lead to some inspiring views though:


This little beauty was also right on a cliff, which actually had a huge arch being carved in it. The trail to get there was much easier and had only a moderate level of cliffs involved. Its called canyon lookout.


There was also quite a bit of wild life that came my way. The most prominent were the squirrels which liked to come right up to you:


They even started going through your bags if they thought there was a treat inside:


Other then the squirrels, I saw eagles, deer, chipmunks, wild turkeys (huge), quite a few insects and other creepy crawlies and a few lizards. I only wish I could have completed the whole wildlife gambit with some gray foxes and a cougar. Overall it was a great trip with some nice rejuvenating "me" time.

In other news I got a call from Sony Pictures Imageworks this week and they offered me an internship for this summer. I don't know all the details yet, but supposedly I'll be working on their upcoming feature film and will be there from mid June to mid August. I am super excited!

Some Animation

I thought it was about time I posted some animation on my blog. This is a weight test I did for class. This is the first animation I've done focusing on the techniques and principles of the masters. If I have time in the future I would like to add his face throughout and his tail, and maybe eventually his hat, but for now I must move on.


Fox Weight Test -First Pass from Qenops on Vimeo.

Senior Film Concept

I painted this up for some concept environment for our senior film. I did it in about an hour. In the end they said they didn't like it because our main character's don't live in areas this dry, but I enjoyed doing it.

Well, I guess I'll do it my way

So Blogger has been giving me troubles recently. I wanted to upload a simple movie, but no matter what format or when I try, it just doesn't want to work. So I decided I'd do it my own way.
This is a render of the fox I've been working on for the last semester. The reason for the grid is that the fur was created using a trial version of Shave and a Haircut. It is also why the movie isn't a full turn-around; the trial ran out before the rendering was done.
He's all rigged up and I'm doing some animations with him. I'll post playblasts when they are looking good. For now enjoy the movies. The high res version is about 9MB and the low is about 80KB.

HIGH-RES FOX

LOW-RES FOX

The Cake is a Lie!

This is a final I did for one of my classes. The theme was "Pretty Ugly," and I think I captured it quite well. It was quite fun coming up with this one. This is by far the most violent image I have ever created, but shouldn't all of us branch out?
I'm sure if you've played Portal you'll enjoy this even more. Maybe I should add a weighted companion cube...but then it would only make me cry.

UPDATE: I changed the lighting to make it look better: