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Ok, I’ve written this post about five times already. Something fishy is going on between Veoh, wordpress and firefox where my post just keeps getting deleted. I’m just too tired to figure out what. So I’m not even going to rewrite all that I wrote…here’s to keeping it short 
We have finally started animating and are beginning to focus more heavily on some of the core principals. Funnily enough the bouncing ball assignment is like “Hello World” for programmers. Learn the basics and the structure and you will go far but you gotta say “Hello World” first. I’d love to give one of my patented long winded post’s but I have a couple of revisions and my regular assignment due.
It’s been a pretty busy week for me all around but informative to say the least. My mentor seems to be a bottomless pit of animation information. I actually thought I knew where all the good stuff was but thanks to Paul I’m sitting on a plethora of new stuff! I actually need to schedule time to go through it all and start putting together my own notes. From the looks of it I’m sure this is just the beginning so I better start categorizing this stuff.
My assignment this week was to draw some sketches of people from life. Basically go out into the world and start sketching. Afterwards, pick a pose you like and put STU in it. Below is a snap shot of the pose I created. Of course I would have loved to put in some fancy lighting, props and other stuff but my mentor was adamant about keeping it simple. So I adhered of course and will wait until the end of the term to spruce everything up for my class one demo reel.
A couple of post ago I spoke about incorporating a 2D pencil test pipeline into my animation work flow. For my Animation Mentor work I’ve decided to go with Jason’s grease pencil located here. If your using Maya this comes highly recommended.
Here are few screens to describe what I’m talking about. This image was posted by Drew Blom over at the “The art of Toon”. If you have a Wacom tablet you can just sketch right inside Maya on each frame and figure out some quick timing before you begin animating. There are so many possibilities that one can come up with via this pipeline that it boggles the mind.
Over at AM this week we start the all important bouncing ball assignments. I’m actually excited about them oddly enough. Can wait to see what happens…
Well the first week is pretty much done. My mentor for this term is CG Animator Paul Allen. Just from the first few minutes of hearing him talk I knew that this was a really cool guy. Paul worked as an animator on the “Ant Bully”, “The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron (TV)” and was the Animation Supervisor for “The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron (feature)” amongst other things.
Paul seems to be very funny and laid back but you get the feeling that teaching is in his blood which is great. I’m excited to see how things progress throughout this term as I’m sure to be in for a really good time.
As expected, at least for class one, this week has been filled with getting re acclimated and reacquainted with the AM site and the new students. Animation Mentor is such a unique place, it is truly a utopia for animators, talk about positive vibes.
No animation assignments yet, more or less your responsible for just introducing yourself and watching orientation videos. This upcoming week will start the slow ramp up to the tepid pace that class one is known for. Better keep that notepad near by and a cup of coffee never hurts either.
On a side note, I’m planning to integrate more 2D pencil tests into my pre-planning/preparation work flow. This is something that has been on my mind for age’s but I never pursued it hard enough. Ideally, if I can get a comfortable work flow going that suits me. Then the incorporation of my thumbnail sketches and 2D pencil tests would be fantastic. Aside from some of the options I’m exploring, it would be nice to use the “grease pencil” and call it a day. We will see how it goes…
If habits are hard to break then you better make them good!
