AM Q6 Week 1 Progress Reel

I am back at AM for the last quarter and there is a lot of work to do. This Quarter is all polish and working and reworking all of my shots. I have 11 short weeks to take me from a C- Student to at least a B- animator.

Originally I was going to skip this post because the homework was simply to upload your progress reel, then I remembered that I didn't finish posting my work from last quarter. Last quarter ended poorly for me, I fell behind one week and was never able to catch up, so I stopped posting because it was disappointing work. I was planning to go back and retroactively post some of the work, which I might, but it until then I will just add the end of the quarter's progress.

Posting this after the fact, I got a C- over all on my work, where an A would be professional and a C would be a good student animator, so I feel that is a very fair evaluation of my work. I know I need to put in more time and do more projects. This makes me long to be out of school and do something like these for fun, but until then I will try my best to work on these for school.

AM Q4 ASN1 Week1 Redux No More Milk

Once again back into the breach.
This Quarter my mentor is Melanie Cordan and she has quiet the impressive resume. She seems super nice and intense as a mentor, I am really stoked for this quarter this I feel will be my make it or break it quarter.

It took me about half the week to come up with the concept for this. I kept trying to figure out a catalyst for the change in emotion, this assignment needs two different beats where the character changes emotion. Last time I did this I tried to have the character have an internal shift, and it just takes too long for 10 seconds of animation. All the other ideas had to do with the character getting hit on the head, which felt too cliche' and then one morning I drank all the milk and Laura was none too pleased and I thought this would work great for a change in some ones attitude, from tired/ lethargic to angry/ energetic.

I started out by shooting video reference again, I feel a little out of practice and I have to be mindful that I am in an apartment now and can't just bang about really loudly. I wasn't 100% on what I wanted to do so i tried to shoot 10 different attempts. From those 10 I decided that these 3 were the best of the different ideas that I came up with while we were filming the piece.

Based off the video reference I started picking and choosing my favorite parts, the first shot was my favorite and i tried to base most of it off of that one and I took what I wanted out of the other ones.
I stated as I usually do by just kinda hand animating/ laying out the scene in photoshop, however this time the end result was less then aesthetically pleasing. Because all of the action happens in a limited space it's hard to see the variation in the movements, I usually take up more space in the scene, so the layered effect was not very effective. However, the point of this is to get my break downs looking correctly and help me to make it all flow and look correctly with each other. (I already saw my crit, because I forgot to post this on Sunday, and my new mentor Melanie was to take this and make an animatic with it, which sound like a great idea)
page1
page2
Based off of my critique I need to work on the ending where he is mad. Some of the things I did were kind of Cliche and I need to add more fury and make him a little more animated in the end. I have a couple of Ideas on how I can improve them and Melanie gave me a couple of starting points for me to jump off of to improve the idea. I am really looking forward to getting back into Maya and doing some blocking.

AM Q3 Progress Reel

Well I have reached the end of Quarter 3 and I can't wait until Quarter 4. Here is everything that I have done thus far at Animation Mentor (in reverse order).

Wow, I hadn't realized how much I grew this quarter until I saw this. I guess that is the point. I have to say that the first assignment is painful to watch, but is actually my favorite. It has lots of fun little segments and I like the change in attitude. . I think I will spend some time and make that work. Maybe I'll change the tree to a dummyI have a much better idea on how to do that now. I also want to improve that drunk scene.
On our last Q&A of the quarter Jalil gave me a special shout out for tanasity, because I guess I got extra hard critiques and I didn't let it phase me and he was happy with my progress. He was my favorite mentor, he pushed me hard and he taught me so much. I have regained my animators eye and now it is impossible to watch anything without critiquing the motion and studding it. It is a gift and a curse and I think it will only get worse, but the first step to becoming a better animator is learning to see motion and break it down. The more you can see the more you can see in your own animation and you will be able to improve it. I wonder which mentor I will get next quarter.
I though I would add the still for my title card this quarter with Spike and I as vikings yelling over ale. This was before I had to cut the sword out to fit in the text. Now for winter break, which will be filled with more work and animation.

AM Q3 ASN2 Video Reference, planning and Blocking

After my e-critique from Jalil, I decided to start over and redo my reference and my planning for this scene. He suggested that I use something that I can actually hit with all my might so that I can get better arcs in my body and more honest acting and poses. He said to make it simpler and to take out any walks that I had going on it it. So I spent a couple of hours shooting reference, it took me a while because there was a guy across the way working on some ones roof and I felt really self conscious. Though I shot it twice after the first time I found out what I really liked about the scene and I was trying to capture different subtle ways of doing it.

After shooting the reference I did my planning drawings. I found a lot more interesting actions to do this time including the sword rolling off the shoulder and moving into an attack stance. I feel that could look really slick.



I e-mailed my new reference and drawings to Jalil and he said that I need to hit the "tree" harder, I'm still holding back. But he said that some other guy from Weta saw my drawings and said they were really nice, so I got that going for me.

Though I didn't get that e-mail until after I had already finished my blocking because Weta is in New Zealand and is a day in the future and He doesn't answer our e-mails on weekends and I sent the e-mail on Friday.

I feel pretty good about my blocking. I think I need to do some more reference with the sword hits and to vary those two hits a little more. But this is a great start.

AM Q2 Progress Reel

Well I have reached the end of Quarter 2 and I can't wait until Quarter 3. Here is everything that I have done thus far at Animation Mentor (in reverse order).
I decided to make a new title page ever quarter because they are fun to make and this one didn't take me too long to make.
I don't think when I made it into a video that it went very well, it got really pixilated and I'm not sure why.
I really love how you can see the progress I have made. Though watching this makes me want to go back into all those old shots and clean them up! Shows me that I am getting my animators eye back, I can see way more errors now then I could before.I think I will spend some time cleaning up some of them in the future.

Animation Mentor Go!

I just started Animation Mentor today and will start posting animations up on this blog sooner or later. This week's assignment was to update my profile so people get an idea of who I am. Stay tuned for Animation! Here is a Sketch to tide you over until I start animating.