Since I had quality new work to show, I thought it would be a good idea to update the ol’ demo reel. This is the first time my AM assignments are showing up on my reel, but I’m sure it won’t be the last. I spent a little time rendering these, and so you can see the new versions here:
http://www.willk.com/demoreel.html (Quicktime required)
Crits and comments welcome.
Quarter 2 is done. Here’s my final version of the emotion assignment.
The first quarter of AM was good because it reinforced things I’d already learned and really gave me a better grip on some of the basics. The emphasis this time was to focus on body movement. During the first one I felt like it was worthwhile, but it was stuff I’d done before. Over the last few weeks, however, I’ve been in totally new territory. It’s the first time in a long time that I’ve had the feeling that my animation was moving to a new level. In his final crit, Gavin seemed to think that I was ready to move on and that it was time to start focusing not just on entertaining and physically sound body movements, but on acting. Lucky for me that’s what we’ll be learning in the coming quarter. After learning so much this last time, I really can’t wait to see what’s ahead.
One more thing, this past week there was a live Q&A with some animators from the Disney, fresh from their work on Chicken Little. Jason Ryan, a super cool mentor who’s with the class ahead of me (sigh) was there, answering questions about the movie and his involvement in it. If I remember correctly he was a lead for animating Chicken Little himself, meaning he had a large role to play in define the acting choices for the character, as well as animating some choice scenes.
Joining him was Clay Kaytis who not only animated on the film (mostly Buck Cluck) but also produces the very cool Animation Podcast.
It was neat to hear them talk about the different way they approached animating a shot, the kind of tools and pipelines they have at the studio, quotas, and the future of Disney animation. Thanks AM, for hooking us up!
This week we had another cool video diary detailing of a student workflow, this time by Matthew Garward. He’s married, has two kids and a full time job and still manages to find the time to do some amazing work at AM. Having recently entered the workforce myself (unfortunately in a position that is not animation related), I found his tips very worthwhile. Mostly he stressed that it was important to get as much done early, and not to procrastinate. Not only does this help if you’re schedule is full, but it gives the other students and your mentor a chance to see your work mid-week. His other secret? Don’t sleep very much. I decided to try it out myself, more out of necessity than anything else, and found that it makes the work days seem long, but it’s tolerable, and you can still get a good bit of animation done in the evening. The key is to make sure you don’t stay up so late you get dimishing returns, and hours go by while staring at the computer screen without any real work getting done. If that happens, it’s time to go to bed! My hat is off to you, Mr. MattG! To do this with a wife and kids as well as a job, you are truly a time management master!
Speaking of animation, this week we were supposed to have our assignment switched to spline. The first and last bits of mine are switched, with varying degrees of success, but I ended up reblocking some things in the middle, so they’re still in stepped for this week. This is the final week for this assignment, and I would really love to have a good, polished, demo reel quality piece coming out of it, so crits and comments are welcome as always.
Puke Animation, half-polished.
Cheers.
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.
Once I’m happy with that, it’s time to put in the model and pose him.
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.
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:
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.
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.
I promised a smoother version of the assignment, and here it is. This is still a work in progress, with this coming week’s goal being to finish it up.
Heavy push. Smooth, yet unfinished.
The posts here have been getting shorter and shorter, as there is not as much explanation required each week for long projects. I’d just like to say that halfway through my second quarter, I’m still immensely satisfied with my Animation Mentor experience. It may just be in my head, but I think that I’m starting to improve. Animation is certainly beginning to come faster and easier to me. Animation Mentor, with their emphasis in planning, is a major part of that.
So…It’s still rockin’. Look for something even better next week (I hope)
For this week, I refined the blocking and tried to nail down some of the timing. You can see some breakdowns have been added and the motion is a little more easy to read. Not much else to say.
Next week I’m gonna be starting the smoothing.