AM Quarter 2 Assignment 1 Polish and Assignment 2 planning

This was the last week for assignment number 1, this week I turned in my polished version of my animation. It is really smooth and i'm pretty happy with it. I'm sure when a more seasoned eye sees it there will be some errors that I can tweak but for myself I am really happy with how clean it is. Never got it this clean at Ai.

I also started assignment number 2. I chose to do a drunken stumble, because i thought researching this part would be alot of fun. I'm always amazed at how difficult it is to get get drunk when your plan is to get drunk but not sick. Needless to say I was unable to get drunk enough to do a proper drunken stumble, but I think my acting skills make up for that.

From the reference I created my planning drawings. I only did the main keys, except for the last line they are broken down a little more. But last time I did this I found more inbetweens when I was working on the blocking. So i figured that should all work out well.I wasn't really sure what to do with the second page. I did the same thing that I did last time where I layer all of the poses on top of each other and it turned out looking really clutter and made me feel like it was missing something.

AM Quarter 2 Assignment 1 Re-Blocking

Refining and revising my animation. Big shout out to Ted this week who continued to lend me his eye and give me insights. It still needs to be tweaked and refined, but I feel it is at a good point to turn it in this week - the final animation isn't due until next week.

AM Quarter 2 Assignment 1 Blocking

The lecture this week was done by Dimos Vrysellas, an animator who approaches 3D animation like it was 2D and called all the key poses "drawings." He also didn't time his keys but just did them one after another until he had them all down.This is a good way to do it with pose theory where one pose needs to flow into another. It helped me to simply focus on the poses and not really worry about the timing yet. I found this method worked really well for me and it also helped me to realize where I needed more breakdowns before I started with the timing. It also lead to cleaner poses. I then spaced out all the key frames by 4 and played that. The timing wasn't correct but I just changed some things to be faster and other things to be slower until it felt right. This method worked really well for me and I hope it leads to simpler clean up and better animation as I progress.

AM Quarter 2 Assignment 1

Ref Yay quarter 2 has started! I'm in Psychology of Body Mechanics and my mentor is an animator named Chad Seller who works at Disney Animation studios right now.
The first assignment for this quarter was to pick an action from a list, there were about 10 of them varying in difficulty. Students were supposed to turn the actions into an animation and work on it progressively for the next 4 weeks. I chose to do jumping over a gap. When I was reading the list the first thing that popped in my head was the scene in "Up" where young Mr.Fredrickson jumps over a small gap in the sidewalk.

The best way to figure out how to do the jump is to do it myself and film it. Reference footage helps for noticing small things that one wouldn't think about as well as provide me with real body mechanics to refer to.

Planning sketch 01
The assignment didn't have any limitations beyond the motion. Though after watching the lecture I decided to give myself the limitation of 120 frames and to try and make the character look proud while he is doing this action. I decided to do this with some cocky hip gestures.
Planning sketch 02
This is the break down of the motion, all the key poses with notes going along with it to explain how the motion works. I didn't add any real frame notations on these notes. I feel that that should be a much more organic process and something I have to see and feel right now. One day I hope I can look at an action and just know the timing.

The next step and the next assignment is to block this motion out - so stayed tuned.

AM Quarter One Progress Reel

Whoo! I have successfully gotten to the end of the quarter. Here is the fruits of my labor.

Next quarter I am going to make an effort on relearning how to make better renders at least for my sketch book assignments. The animation is the most important but a nice render doesn't hurt. Yay! A new academic goal for next quarter.

AM week 11

Week 11, only one more week to go and I will have completed my first quarter at Animation Mentor.
The animation assignment this week was to finalize and polish the character walk that I blocked out last week. This week it started out really rough until I redid my blocking then everything just fell into place.

Igor walk. I really want to do this walk with a torso. I think I will work on that.
Week 11 Balance sketches. The assignment was to have the character have more weight on one leg then the other but have the pose still look balanced.

Week 11 balance STU pose.


Week 10 Exhausted pose revisions. I seem to perpetually choose the wrong sketches to go forward with. I usally base my disision on what other people think works the best and what I feel I can pull off. That seems to lead me down a cliche and boring path. Here are two poses that I didn't do that my mentor liked.
Week 10 Exhausted pose revisions

AM Week 10

Week 10's assignment is a character walk. I decided to do some one with a limp, which quickly turned into an Igor style walk.

Reference video that I filmed of myself so that I could break down the motion.
Planning for the walk

The Blocking for the Igor walk. Next week the final version of the walk
Week 10 Exhaustion pose sketches
Exhausted STU pose

Revision on last weeks assignment, I'm still having some problems with knee wobble, i'm not sure how best to track the knees and how to make them not wobble.