Will Kistler’s AnimationMentor.com Experience

So, there was some server trouble at AM this week. For anyone who’s not enrolled in Animation Mentor, I just want to say that this is the first time there’s been any sort of big technical woes, and the staff at AM handled things brilliantly, putting in a lot of time over the Thanksgiving holiday to get things back in order. Those of you who are currently studying with AM, I’m just saying what you already know.

Anyway, point being, I had an extra week to refine my blocking, so I added several breakdowns and some more storytelling poses. Now the animation is much closer to what I originally envisioned

Puke Emotion Test – Further Blocking

This coming week will be our first with the animation transitioned to smooth. Look for exciting things! I’m really enjoying working on this one, and appreciate the feedback so far to help improve it. Please, keep it coming.

This week AM put up a video made by the uber-talented Rebecca Perez-Dominguez that detailed her workflow for one of our assignments. I decided to try to use some of her very, very good ideas while advancing my current project.

Her method included drawing all of the main storytelling poses out on paper. Although the final animation will be CG, the paper is super fast for thumbnailing out a pose. Here’s the paper version:

Next step: Put these sketches into maya with Jason Schleifer’s amazing grease pencil tool. With this I’m able to get the timing somewhat nailed down, and it goes much more quickly than posing the character.

2D Grease-Pencil Blocking.

Once I’m happy with that, it’s time to put in the model and pose him.

3D Blocking.

And it’s as easy as that! Next week I’ll be taking this to a smoothed version, so comments and crits are welcome, as always.

After one final crit, I’m finally putting the Heavy Push assignment to bed. I’m happy with how this turned out, and while I could fiddle with it forever, I’m going to call it instead. It’s done.

Final Heavy Push

This one’s going on the reel.

Now that that’s taken care of, it’s time to start something new. This week we were to block out our 4 main emotion poses. I decided to work on what I will refer to as the puking scenario, which I outlined last time. I actually filmed reference for both the puking scenario and the croquet ball scenario, but over the course of acting/transferring/watching the footage, I decided I couldn’t not go with the puking. I do have one thing to say about this, however. My goal is to make it more funny than gross. I don’t want people to watch it and get ill. With that in mind, I’ll be trying to keep things classy. Well, as classy as possible.

Here’re the first four poses, sans any sort of timing, to get you started:

Puking Scenario Poses

See you next week with the scene much more blocked.

This is the last week we’re working on the heavy push. It may be revised slightly for next week, but this is what I’m turning in right now. Crits and comments welcome as always.

“Final” Heavy Push.

Past that, we’re getting started working on our next project. Sketchbook assignment for this week was to sketch out some ideas for our next piece, which will be an emotion test. The idea is to have a quick scene where the character goes though the following emotional states: relaxed, alert, engaged, rejected or disgusted. I came up with four stories.

Scenario #1

This was by far the worst idea I had. Stewie is doing push ups, notices a girl, and tries to impress her with his muscles. Then he tries to play it off. Nothing terribly wrong with this scene, but it seems too obvious. Like it might have been done before, oh, about a million times already.

Scenario #2

This one I like a lot. Stewie is stirring his cauldron. He adds an ingredient and a little puff of smoke comes out. He catches a whiff and pukes into the cauldron, which causes a larger puff of smoke to come out, which kills him. I like it ’cause it’s gross.

Scenario #3

I like this one too. A croquet ball rolls into the scene, and the Stewie hits it, hard. He watches it sail off, and then winces empathetically as it hits something off screen, and looks away. When he peeks back to check, the ball hits him in the stomach. Hilarious!

Scenario #4

This one’s less physical, but I like it also. A mysterious sign dangles in front of Stewie, requesting that he pull. He does, and it reveals the sad, sad truth. Poor Stewie, he has no friends.

And those are the ideas. I’m interested to hear what people have to say about these possible storylines.