The animation with a .... je ne sais quoi!
I finally realised that I wouldn’t need to buy hundreds of pound worth of paint, sponge,rollers to do the backgrounds for my short but use the regular Photoshop instead. Here is a quick test in the spirit of the 1950s cartoons.
The former 10 seconds club died few years back but the “11 seconds club” has been alive for the past few month and the level is now really steep. Animation Mentor is also sponsoring the monthly character animation competition and the winner gets his shot “eCritiqued” by one of the fantastic Animation Mentor mentors.
Like I said the level is really high. I know some of the top contestants through the school and they have sinced been snapped up by top feature studios like my friend Philip To or are about to rock the animation industry like brazilian AM student, Bruno Monteiro. Bruno won the “11 seconds club” competion twice if I remember correctly and at school he constantly mixes 2d and 3d. It’s a pure joy to see his assignments every weeks.
Anyway February’s competition was won by Phillip Hall for his really entertaining piece so go and watch it , then have a look at what Dreamworks Dave Burgess had to say about it. Arcs, staging, twinning, opposite actions, a 15 minutes animation lectures for free thanks to Animation Mentor and “11 seconds club”.
we didn’t have time to speak with everyone this week so here is a mugshot of the people we met today. Shad is currently in games working for Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment and previously worked on “Curious George”. Ron used to work at Secret Level game studio until Dreamworks snapped him up. The last game he worked on is Iron Man! How cool is that! My favourite superhero!
Here we are. Back to AM for a new Class 6. It’s pretty cool, I am back to AM with some of my first classmates, superstar animator Salem Arfaoui, Michael Herold but the coolest thing ever is that I am gonna be mentored by Kevin Koch! I was stalking his blog for a while http://www.synchrolux.com/ and now he is gonna deliver his knowledge every week through webcam! How cool is that? Kevin has worked at Dreamworks for few years from back in the 2d days till 2006.
I am gonna learn a lot this term again!
For our last Q&A, Jason was in a hotel room where he would spend few nights while attending a workshop at Dreamworks Glendale, hosted by James Baxter! Nice. Unfortunately it was our last Q*A so we will never know what James Baxter spoke about 🙁
Here is a mugshot of Jason, surrounded by my fellow classmates. Hopefully we will all meet again at the Graduation Ceremony in San Francisco this summer and you will probably see the names of at least 2 of them in the credits of forecoming features!!!
After few weeks working like a mad man. Class6 is finally coming to an end. Unfortunately I won’t be able to finish my short on time and will have to redo class 6 but it was a blast again and for this class I was privileged to have animator extraordinaire Jason Schleifer as a mentor..
For those who don’t know, Jason is an animation superstar who started his animation career at Weta and after few years at Dreamworks working on everything that was thrown at him 😉 he is currently a supervising animator on the sequel of my favourite Dreamworks show: “Madagascar 2” (Prince of Egypt and Eldorado are my second favourite).
He was really inspiring and having him for mentor for my short was a god send. He really helped me out in defining my character’s personality and without him I am not sure if my short would have been as strong. Obviously I am paying the consequences as well and some of the shots that were meant to last 4 seconds ended up well over 20 seconds 😉 anyway this will make my short even better and I don’t regret it at all! Instead of a 30seconds short I will end up around 2 minutes which is … perfect for festivals 😉
caricature by the great Mark Behm
Nothing really new here. You are all subscribers to Jason Ryan’s newsletter and know his workflow very well. Personally I love it especially for broad animations or physical shots.
Here is one shot I planned using this technique with my favourite 2d digital software: TV Paint
Animation Mentor just started and many class 1 students are asking how they can produce a quicktime presentation.
Here are the settings you should pay attention to
This is the important bit. If you want your slides to last few seconds, you should select “4 seconds per frame” or upwards. No need to copy the frames 24times to get 4 seconds like I heard some people are doing.
[update May 2013]
This post seems to have attracted some attention lately so I feel I need to to make an update.
I graduated from Animation Mentor in 2008 and haven’t had much contact with the school or the current AM community for a very long time so take this article with a pinch of salt. I haven’t caught up with the recent changes at AM, well I have but I just couldn’t understand the new syllabus (actually it is not that hard http://www.animationmentor.com/animation-program/animation-basics/ they just made things appear more complicated when they announced the AMP pipeline).
Back in my days, AM was a great foundation course from which a lot of people went on to get feature animation jobs and build an incredible network of professional animators friends. This probably still applies in 2013.
If you already have plenty of animation experience though, I might direct you to other online or on-site animation schools like Animation Collaborative, AnimSquad, Ianimate and AnimSchool since those are only taught by senior feature animators and even supervising animators from top studios.
The way things are going, if you don’t go to one of those recent “polishing schools”, I don’t thing you will be able to break into feature animation nowadays.
AM logo
People around me know that AM has been for me a love and hate relationship all along and unlike some other students I didn’t get caught in the “everything is awesome” bubble that wraps most people as soon as they join AM.
I did my fair bit of bashing in the past and nearly gave up in the middle of Class 5 but like fine wine, the school is gradually getting better and better and that’s amazing for a school who has been in business for only few years. Today I wanted to share a comment I posted on the Splinedoctors blog since I have more audience here than they will ever have. Just kidding.
Is Animation Mentor expensive?.
Well that s an interesting question that deserves to be answered.
I would be tempted to say yes but looking around, how many cheaper options do you get if you are not french, already ultra talented and selected by Les Gobelins animation school?
What else do you get for those $15,000 and ultimately, how long would it take you to pay back that money if you got this animation dream job?
Personally that money was my savings to pay the deposit for a mortgage but since I was working while doing AM I could have quickly recovered the cost of AM with my new animation job. Now I live in UK, I have no clue if this applies to other countries, the dollar is at it lowest level since 1982 I am told.
After 18 month at AM and without any animation experience previously, the students who reached the upper classes, apply for jobs where we are in competition with people who had been through 4 to 5 years of university!
Foundation course: 1 year
BA: 3 years
Some guys who applied for the same job I was applying for even had Masters or Post graduate diplomas!
Does one realise how much it cost to spend 4 years at university? Think about the tuition, the housing…. Let alone the fact that most people can’t move city and have to do AM on top of a full time job.
Now don’t get over excited 😉 This doesn’t mean that you just need to pay your $15,000 AM tuition to get a job. Your mentors won’t animate the shots for you and you will still have to work realllllly hard to polish this Showreel that will get you where you always wanted to be!
Animation is hard, no matter how much you paid or what school you went to but AM gives you access to a crazy community of people who love and live for animation and if you make the most of it, you will definitely reap the rewards of it.
Animation Mentor might seem expensive at first glance, but it is not.
[update] at the moment, the Short film has been removed from the program. I am completely against the idea and I just hope they bring it back very quickly.
Do no worry, I haven’t given up on my pantomime shot yet but I still have to polish my old shots so here is one of the oldies.
That one was on the back burner for a long time since I didn’t have a clue how to tackle the animation for the towel. Maya 8.5 and Ncloth have certainly gone a long way since the first years of cloth simulation but I finally had to resort to something else after few hours of research and failure.
Wrap deformers… that s all was needed!!! no need of fancy dynamics! Thanks to Ninja Philip To for the tip.
How do you like his hat? this was a quick test in Zbrush, I really liked the idea but I am not sure it will work with Bishop very odd shaped cranium.
