Class 2 Weeks 1-4

First 4 weeks are done and dusted already! Gah!

‘Psychology of Body Mechanics’ has been a very challenging class so far, but I’m learning a lot. We’re starting to get right into the nitty-gritty of physical movement now, which is EXACTLY what I need, I’ve always felt that one area I could really improve on is getting the weight and timing of a movement just right. Oh, and my mentor this class is SHAUN FREEMAN – He. Is. AWESOME! Shaun is also an AUSSIE! Hahah, how’s that! He’s from Melbourne but is currently in the US doing Freelance work. He’s animated on films including Happy Feet, Open Season 2 and others. Shaun used to be a science teacher before he became an animator, and you can totally tell. He is SO good at explaining things and always gives you a very detailed response to any questions. I have learnt a heap from him already and even though we’ve only been working on one assignment for the past 4 weeks, I’ve seen myself improve just in that time with Shaun’s mentoring. Speaking of assignments, I have posted my ‘polished’ (although I may still tweak) version of our first assignment for class 2. Basically there was a pick list of about 10 options to choose from, 10 different physical actions. The one I chose was having Ballie, from a standstill, take a big step and then settle. Easier said than done haha.

UPDATE FAIL

Yeh……lol

So, I start class 2 of Animation Mentor tomorrow! yaayyy!

WHAT??! you say… Let me explain my lack of updating for a good portion of class 1! Haha. About half way through the course my father’s health deteriorated somewhat. This resulted in me being a lot busier than anticipated, with having to fly to Brisbane for medical advice/Dad’s surgery etc, and then I sort of lost track of this blog. I am happy to say though that, 1 – Dad is back home and recovering slowly, but well. And 2,  I am now able to continue this blog with a big more consistency!

Class 1 of AM was an absoulute blast. Don Kim was such a fantastic and knowledgable mentor and I can’t wait to find out who my new mentor is tomorrow morning! Class 2 (Psychology Of Body Mechanics) is going to be very, VERY challenging but hopefully just as rewarding!

Below is my progress reel of everything I animated in Class 1. Excuse the dodgy title at the start, I’m working on putting in a better one. I received an A- overall this term, which I am VERY happy about, even though I’m really only satisfied with about 2 of the shots in my reel haha.

Can’t wait until tomorrow!

Pendulum Time

Getting right into it now!

Now we have to animate a pendulum-type character to show our understanding of overlapping action.  We have two options – a simple left to right movement of the object and the overlap of the ‘tail’ which has three joints to deal with, or, do a more complex movement such as a figure 8 or something similar. I’m going to try and go for the more complex movement – and hope I don’t regret it later on haha, but I want to really challenge myself.

My obstacle course from last week went pretty well, just a couple of frames to tweak before I post it up. I’m not going to post up my devastated pose yet either, I’m going to redo it because I think it’s shit. Baha. I was rushing it at the end and realised later on that…I hate it lol. So, will put that up next week as well. Below however are my two balls of different weights. Now I didn’t get time to go back and revise this, but I am fairly happy with how it looks right now, so I’ll make the tweaks I need to before I create my WIP reel. This week’s assignment is going to be really time-consuming I feel, so I had better go and START!

Week 4 – Obstacle Course and My Two Balls!

Animation Mentor has been such a great experience so far! It’s been more challenging and more fun than I expected, and it’s just what I have been needing to get motivated to get some actual animation produced! As I have been getting used to just how much time and effort I need to devote to this course, my grades have also been improving over the past three weeks, this week, on my two balls assignment I got an A! HUZZAH! Now to maintain that…haha, easier said than done. I was pretty happy with the critique Don gave me this week. I chose to animate a bowling ball and a beach ball to show a good difference in weight. I added a little extra, I had the bowling ball smash into the ground, leaving a dent and have a couple of pieces of floor fly out. Don seemed to like the added detail, so I’m glad I made the effort to put it in. He had a couple of comments to make about some small tweaks to one of the arcs of the bowling ball and the last few bounces of the beach ball. I will revise this and then post the two balls on here next week.

This week’s assignment is to animate a ball anticipating and then taking off, and traveling through a small obstacle course – and this week we get to use SQUASH AND STRETCH! WOOT! This is going to be quite a challenging exercise I think. We also have to sketch poses of DEVASTATION. Good. I like dramatic poses lol.

So! below is my revised version of my first bouncing ball. After the revision Don suggested a couple more tiny tweaks that could be made on an arc or two. If I have time in the future I’ll go back and tweak again, probably before I put up my class 1 demo reel haha.

Week 3 – Having a Ball

Ohoho, see what I did with the title there? BOUNCING BALL TIME!

So, I think I did alright with my ball that had to be the weight of about a basketball or soccer ball. I’m not going to post it until next week though, as we’re allowed to take into account any of our mentor’s comments, tweak the shot and repost it for him to have another look at. So I’ll post the fixed version yeh! Also, below are my sketches of ‘excited’ poses. Well most of them, except number 6, that after staring at for a while, I have decided is more frustrated than excited. The challenge with these poses is having them read clearly without the use of facial expressions. If you could slap an expression on number 6, you could easily have it read as excited. So this exercise is fantastic for being CLEAR and CONCISE through the WHOLE body. While also trying to avoid cliché poses – haha! I tried to avoid tooo many poses of a character jumping and flailing its arms in the air. Hmmm I have also decided that my sketches are not loose enough. I don’t know why I’ve slipped into sketching with so much ‘detail’ and not as much ‘flow. So, next pose assignment I shall try to loosen up! We don’t actually have a pose assignment this week so I have a bit of time to practise.

So this week we get to play with two balls. Yes, take that however you wish.

But really! it should be a fun assignment, two bouncing balls with different weights (such as a beach ball and a bowling ball). Watched a fantastic lecture the other day on timing and spacing – congrats to the AM crew for making the lectures so detailed and entertaining!

Week 2 and My First Assignment

Well well well a busy week in the land of AM!

This week we had to sketch a bunch of gesture drawings from real life and from magazines, then pick one of those poses and use the Stu rig to re-make/improve it in Maya. I quite enjoyed getting out to do some sketching from real life, hadn’t done it that much lately, I must get back into it! Below you can see the drawings I did, the one I chose and the final 3d pose. I had issues on how much I should change the weight-bearing (his right) leg, as I wanted to keep that line of action sort of going through both legs, but he was looking a bit unbalanced. I tweaked it a little but I could have changed that inside leg a LOT more. Geh! My E-critique was AWESOME, and Don also commented on bringing that leg forward even more to give him more balance. He also went into great detail commenting on my sketches, which was great – lots to learn and lots to improve on. I got lots of feedback from my peers as well, I enjoy reading their comments and posting comments of my own on their work.

This week, the good ol’ bouncing ball! Will be good to get into some animating. We also have to sketch gesture drawings of people who are ‘excited’, pick the best one and pose it with Stu. Lots to do! should probably get on with it! Click on the images below for a better view.

The Other Side

First week of Animation Mentor! WOW!!

So much to see, so much to do! My mentor for this first class is super great, his name is Don Kim – he’s worked for Disney doing 2d,  worked in 3d at Blue Sky Studios (on Robots) and currently works at Nelvana Studios, directing a TV series. I’m going to learn so much from him!

The full Animation Mentor website is really well laid out and there is SO much information, even for the first week. I’ve spent several days going through training videos and the like, and I keep discovering stuff I’ve missed each time I return to the site! Everyone is also extremely friendly and helpful – a real learning community.

So first week we don’t really have an assignment, we were just asked to set up our profiles, watch the introduction lecture and introduce ourselves in our live Q&A. The Q&A was a cool experience. There were some technical glitches for a few people (it took several goes to get my audio working properly) but by the end of the session everything was working as it should be. We all got to see each other on webcam and listen to everyone’s reasons for coming to AM etc. All of my classmates are really friendly and have such interesting backgrounds. I have people in my class from Western Australia, the US, Canada, the Cayman Islands, Palestine and probably other places I’ve forgotten about! Pretty neat!

This week we get our first real assignment, can’t wait to get started on it!