The animation with a .... je ne sais quoi!
Personnaly I really enjoyed that first Q&A Robert was full of energy and had a lot to say. We even managed to ask few questions 😉 and he gave us a sneak preview at the more advances classes lectures
Here is a pic of the one who dared to raise their head or where hand picked to be on the webcam.
Here is my Class 01 Showreel in the following state:
1. Perspective walk cycle, not done
2. Personality walk (sneak walk), the Heel shouldn’t make contact
3. Vanilla walk…. still a big concern
4. Taylor, problem with hoockup between first jump and second, tail animation to be redone from scratch
5. Pendulum, needs more hangtime and a slower settle
6. Obstacle course, I am pretty pleased with it but might have to remove one frame towards the end of the animation
7. 2 balls of different weight, the heavy one needs one more bounce
8. boucing ball. Well, with the Obstacle course, those 2 animations are the only ones I am happy with…. can I make a career out of making balls boucing? not too sure about that 🙂
Animation Mentor is an amazing school but you need to make sure you are gonna be able to fully commit before you start or you might end up wasting your time and a lot of money!!
Yes it is online but it is still a very intensive course and with one assignement every week, only 2 breaks during the year, you’d better make sure that you won’t have any financial, personal, physical issues.
I started to suffer from CTS towards the end of Class 01 and had to take a break from animation when all my fellow classmates where having fun doing Walk cycles. Luckily I had some very good grades at the begining and managed to get to Class 02.
Stu pose : exhausted
Stu pose: Balance
Today was the final Class 1 Q&A. Salem was the only student missing. This class was a blast and Cassidy was definitely the right mentor we needed for our entrance in the animation world. See you all the Euros at Annecy!!!
Regarding my last assignements, I am now suffering from a start of CTS (Carpal Tunnel Syndrome) and will probably have to leave the last 3 assignements as they are. I will try to give my wrist some time off for the moment. I have been using a Wacom tablet since the begining of AM but that still didn’t prevent it to happen. I have now bought a chair with Armrests and next week I am gonna buy a proper desk or just reorganise my old one.
Today is the first of April but AM is not the kind of school do april fools so well, I am pretty lucky this time again. Robert Russ will be my new mentor for Class 02.
“Robert Russ joined Pixar Animation Studios in 1996 and has had the opportunity to work on almost all of the Pixar films. He began his work at Pixar as a crowd animator on “A Bug’s Life”. From there, he moved on to work as an animator on “Toy Story 2,” “Monsters, Inc.” and the Academy Award©-winning, “Finding Nemo.” For Pixar’s sixth feature film, “The Incredibles,” Robert was able to expand his role as an animator by assisting the character articulation team to build the basic set of controls that animators use to animate all the characters. This process involved helping design the controls, model testing and creating animation tests. Once the control creation process was complete, Robert directed his attention to animating the characters Edna Mode (“E”), Mr. Incredible/Bob Parr and Elastigirl/Helen Parr.”
I have seen his previous E-critiques and it looks like all the hard work we are gonna put into our assignements will pay off.
Planning of the Sneak walk:
Spline mode Vanilla walk and first pass Sneak Walk
Stu pose exhausted. no time to do too many sketches this week and it looks like I made the wrong choice.
Revision 108 refining. This is when everything started to go wrong. Too busy at work to spend time on AM, CTS worries, Step mode to Spline workflow issues…. as you can see I deviated a lot from the original planning in order to fix knees pop but I am now ending up with a walkcycle too even on the Y axis. I am still trying to find a workflow in order to fix that.
I have been very busy lately and couldn’t finish my last 2 assignement on time this week. Got a D mark which is not good but my bosses were opening a new internet café and I had to do all the networking, server, workstation setup.
The internet café is now ready but I was also involved in the design of www.stagknight.com which had been taking all my energy for the past 2 weeks. I eventually managed to pass the website to my friend Sergio from Vulcanstudios.com all for the best. Stagknight is a comic/horror movie (“Shawn of the Dead” kind of stuff) that should be coming out around July. Virals online soon.
Today we had our weekly London Animation Mentor lunch at the Newman Arms where we ate delicious Pies and Matt Morris joined us after a 2 month break from Animation Mentor.
It is now time for me to catch up with my previous assignement and try to get some good marks. 😉 Would be a shame to fail on the first assignement that belongs to a showreel….
Oh oh oh… I was about to forget last week sketches and Stu pose: Concerned
Last week strong pose and sketches
Revision, much better isn’t it?
My first AM walk cycle. It is meant to be a Vanilla Walk (the most basic walk) but I ended up doing a cartoony walk…. will try to fix it for tomorrow.
I have a big issue with the hip of the coming forward leg during the passing position (breakdown). Cassidy is saying that it should go down when I think it should go up. I actually shot some references of myself to confirm it but I am not gonna show u what I look like in Underwears 😉
We had a fun session of headphone rotation this morning
The sun started to rise in Italy during the Q&A
While going through some of my life drawings yesterday, I found that one. Quite an interesting exercise. The right leg is too long but the rest looks okay to me. Not my best drawing but the most interesting in term of rendering.
Taylor…. fun exercise someone said? well… not for me 😐 Everything went wrong this week. I started with an ambitious planning, set up few shortcuts just in case, and decided to animate in step mode for the first time. After more than 20 hours and 2 hours before the deadline, I realised it was going pretty much nowhere. I scrapped it all to restart from scratch, with no planning. No planning? well that was a mistake again. I went ahead for a 2 bounce animation when we were asked to do a 3 bounce. The animation was pretty much finished and adding a third bounce when the overlapping action was done for 2 bounces was not a very good idea. In animation it is called a “hookup” I think. It is something that animators dread and I just experienced why. Luckily I should have time to polish it this week and probably redo the entire tail animation.
did you see my face on the screenshot from Animation Mentor Q&A? yes I have a big issue with the 5.30 AM Q&A…. I just can’t do it! Once again I missed this week Q&A… It is not every day you have the chance to speak to someone who has worked on movies like Shreck 1,2,3, Madagascar, Shark Tales. It is not every day but for me it is meant to be every week and unfortunately my internal clock just can’t do it. Cassidy is a great animator and also a great mentor who wants to share all his knowledge with us so that really sucks….
There’s also this big weight I am dragging with me at the moment… Hopefully this will be resolved in few weeks and I won’t need to work that hard anymore. Well… I am not actually known for being someone who takes it easy but we will see 😉
