Will Kistler’s AnimationMentor.com Experience

This week we were to animate a one legged character with a ball body (appropriately named “one-leg”) jumping and recovering, using all of the principals we’ve learned so far and paying special attention to arcs and the path of action.

I had been lucky enough to find time (on planes and waiting for Siggraph sessions to begin) to plan this weeks animation, but It was only today that I was able to watch this weeks lecture and animate the darn thing. I finished the jump in a few scant hours, and well in time to get it turned in. Unfortunately, I didn’t really have time to get the quality feedback I’m used to recieving from the Animation Mentor community, which I credit largely with the success of my animation exercises so far. So this one, I did on my own. Here’s the planning and the clip.

One leg jump’s and recovers.

Speaking of feedback, I got some for last week’s clip of Tailor, so here’s a revision for that one:

Tailor, the ball, jumps around, revision

I’m finally home from Siggraph 2005, which was rocking. It was one of the best experiences I’ve had in a long time, although no one fell to their knees, tears of joy welling up in their eyes, at the sight of my demo reel, demanding to hire me on the spot. The trip did, however, give me renewed hope for the possibility of spinning this animation thing I enjoy so much into a career.

With my jetting across the country, and trying to absorb every singly aspect of the conference, I failed to post last weeks assignment. So here it is, a week after I actually finished it.

This week we learned about overlapping action by bouncing a ball with a tail at least 3 times. Here’s my planning and animation:

Tailor, the ball, bounces around.

I was pretty happy with the results, but a tweaked revision will probably be posted before too long as well.

In addition, a slightly tweaked version of last session’s animation of a ball in the obstacle course can be seen here:

Ball in the obstacle course, revised.

Turns out, Siggraph is super cool. I was expecting as much, but it’s nice to see it in practice.

There’s a ton of amazing animation in the Animation Theater (and some mediocre ones, too, but they’re worth sitting through to get to the ones that are really good.)

First thing this morning I hit up the job fair. It was everything I imagined a job fair could be! I went up to people and asked “Are you accepting reels and resumes?” and they answered “Yes.” I didn’t have to explain what it is that I do. I didn’t have to try to convince a poor bored HR person that their company might need someone like me. And best of all, there were people hiring for jobs, I wanted. Totally different from past job fair experiences.

Needless to say, it went pretty well. I got some good feedback on the reel from Shawn Kelly, ILM animator. It really made my day when he was impressed with part of it! AN ILM ANIMATOR!!! And for the rest he had absolutely great advice. Really cool. I also may have gotten an animation test from a video game company. The art director of another company may be sending me an animation test, and a couple of booth staffers told me that they’re getting ready to hire a bunch of people, so I’m pretty excited.

Tomorrow I’m hitting the electronic theater and returning to the exhibition floor, which is crazy. So much loud noise, and flashing lights. It’s like punishment for epileptics, but it’s pretty cool for me!

Final thought, I met a guy today who not only had reels to hand out, but his reel was on PSP, so it was easy to show to people on the spot. Genious!

New animation sometime coming over the weekend. In the meantime, Summer 2005 Demo Reel is up on my website. Critiques welcome.

Hey, it’s that time of the week again. This week’s assignment had two parts. For the first, we were supposed to have a ball start from a resting position and move through an obstacle course. Finally we were allowed to use squash and stretch, and anticipation was required for getting the ball started. Once again, everything was planned on paper first. Please let me know what you think.

Ball Bouncing Through Obstacle Course

The second part of the assignment was to sketch, and then create in 3D a devastated pose. I tried for an extremely closed pose, like someone having trouble dealing with the outside world. The problem with this is that it really makes the silhouette hard to read. I would definitely welcome any commentary on how to improve it.

Thats it for this week. Hopefully more demo clips will be coming soon.

I’m getting a Siggraph Reel together, and I want this clip on it. The clip started as a run cycle and just grew from there. I’ve been working on and off on it for a couple weeks now, and it’s about ready for some critique.

Runnin’ and Jumpin’

Please look at it and tell me what you think can be improved. You don’t have to be an animator to comment (most everyone can tell if something looks bad).

A couple weeks ago, Scott Lemmer, mentor extraordinaire, gave us a really handy tip, so I thought I would share it.

If you have a CRT monitor, you can use a dry-erase marker to write directly on your screen. It’s really helpful if you go frame-by-frame through your animation and either plot out where something is on each frame, or where you want it to be. Then you can just wipe it off.

This works great for bouncing balls, which is why Scott told us about it, I’m sure, but I’ve also been using it on isolated body parts in full character animation to try to make sure that I’m getting arcs in my motion. It’s working great there, too!

Super handy!!!

Well I managed to get another weeks worth of work done. This time around the assignment was to have two different balls that are different weights in the same scene. I dug out the ol’ video camera for this one and taped myself dropping a big pink superball and an old wooden skee-ball.* The video isn’t worth posting here, but these sketches were the result:

They may not look like much, but I stuck to them, and got something pretty close to what I wanted. A few tweaks later and the final result popped out. For this one we weren’t supposed to use any squash and stretch, but instead convey the idea using those most fundamental of fundamenal: timing and spacing. Actually, I wasn’t supposed to use squash and stretch on the last one, but I missed that particular instruction. This time I stuck to the requirements.

Two balls with different weights.

I think next week we learn about squash and stretch.

Finally, I revised last week’s excitement post. Not much different, but with Scott’s suggestions, as always, a little went a long way.

Other big news: I’ve been animating every day with Siggraph ’05 in mind. I would really like to have some good animation to put into my demo reel before the conference, so expect a new clip or two soon!

*Video reference fun-fact: repeatedly dropping a skee-ball on a hardwood floor will annoy the other people in the house.

I’ve done a lot since my last post. This should catch things up, hopefully.

This week we learned about the importance of planning. We learned different ways to plan and block shots, very cool. To go along, a ball rig was given to us, and we were supposed to plan and animate it bouncing. I used video reference of a basketball, and timed how long each bounce should be. Here’s the planning on paper that resulted:

After that, I was ready to animate. I did 5 passes on this animation, and you can see them here.
Pass 01
Pass 02
Pass 03
Pass 04
Final Pass
I don’t plan to always post ever single little step along the way, but I thought it’d be nice to be able to look back and see my progress on this first assignment.

We also had to pose a character in an excited way. I sketched several possible poses, trying to find one that wasn’t cliche:

Here is what I came up with:

Yes!!!!

Also, I made slight modifications to last week’s pose. I’m not sure if they helped, but I don’t think they hurt.

That’s a lot in one shot, but it’s what I’ve been up to most of the week. Comments on any of it are more than welcome.

I finally added some of the pictures I drew in my recent life drawing class to the still gallery of my website

Check it out here.

Today our first assignment is due. Goal was to sketch some people and then make our model pose in a manner that is based on that sketch. I started out with three, and posted them in my area of the site. Almost immediately I was given quite a lot of really good feedback. I was so happy with this, that I ended up spending a long time myself trying to look around the site and leave feedback for others. This community is rocking.
Here are my poses. These first two are just for practice:


This is the one I’m actually turning in. I’ve changed it from the original sketch to try to make it more interesting. Maybe it worked, you can judge:

I’m looking forward to this next week. I believe in session three there is some actual animation. Can’t wait!