Today was the kick off for the European Animation Mentor gathering and let me tell you something….. This first day was AWWWWESOMMMEE 😉

We started by a 2 hours visit of Passion Picture, then Smoke and Mirrors, followed by MPC and ended by Double Neg. Now as Character animators what do you think was the highlight of the day? Passion Picture? Close but not exactly that 😉

Remember Animation Podcast number 10 and 11? Eamonn Butler, Disney’s Animation Supervisor on Chicken Little and Dinosaurs? Does this ring a bell. Well if you have a good memory you remember that he surprisingly left Disney to try different things?

Guess what? He now works for London based Double Negative!

Instead of giving us a simple studio tour he pretty much gave us a full animation lecture showcasing some of their recent work!

I lost a bit faith when I realised I wouldn’t be able to get an US visa that easily but having Eamonn Butler in London is a bit like having Brad Bird in town so I am not too worried anymore. Let’s just stay in London then!

Robbie’s impression of Princess Fiona

This Q&A was the last one, the longest one to the point of nearly getting booted out by the website and the funniest ever.

We had the frustrating echo problems again but we got to hear Robbie sing a song at the guitar then do an impression of Princess Fiona. Michelle went through everyone’s work for this term except for the missing in action Salem. Carmelo couldn’t stay too long because of his TV work and eventually got booted out from the website just before his turn.

Too bad I didn’t manage to record Robbie’s song, it would have easily ended up on Youtube.

I want to thank Michelle for this great term and all my classmates. I was with most of you since Class1 and will miss you dearly for the next 3 month. Luckily some of use use Skype and the flashmeetings to stay in touch.

This term didn’t go according to plan once again but with Keith Lango’s training I should be ready to kick some butts by January. This break will allow me to strengthen my animation workflow but also to go back to modeling and lighting in my favourite package and also to get back to life drawing and sketching.

I am hoping to come back very strong and even have my own character designs for the Short Class.

Rock on!

Here is the blocking+ for my first acting shot. Except the mouth open/close we don’t have any facial controller yet. He is supposed to be holding a towel with the right hand but I don’t really know how I am gonna go about that yet.

This is in no way what I would send to a company in order to get a job but I still decided to make a compilation of my animation work till now just for reference and for people who want to know what level I am at right now.

Once I get a chance to find a bit more time, I will go and rework all those assignments except the bouncing ball and the poses since I think that those are fine compared to the rest.

For the south park animation I am working on a new short with my friend Osagie and hopefully this will replace it.

Animation compilation Septembre 2006

Here is the WIP of my Showreel.

Here is my “gear change” shot. Still a lot of work to do on this but Michelle has been very positive and there is a chance this could look great with a bit more work

This is my selection for my first dialogue shot. Youhou! Dialogue shot!

I finally handed my fisherman final and already got my ecritique. Michelle is an awesome mentor who really cares about her mentees. It was crap as usual but thanks to Keith Lango VTS 17 freebie and our new lecture by ILM’s Delio Tramontozzi I feel like I know where I am going now.

If you haven’t heard about Keith Lango’s VTS yet, this is the missing link. This is what will allow you to apply the “Illusion of life”‘s principle into your favourite 3d package (3dsmax obviously 😉 ).

Delio’s lecture is a dialogue walkthrough. I got fed up with having mentors using crappy Macs and it was very refreshing to see him using Windows XP 😉

This week we have to choose 3 lines from movies we want to animate on. We already got our new rig Bishop and …… he is just sooooo cute.

Here is a quick and dirty walkcycle with our new Animation Mentor rig “Bishop”. It’s a really nice rig.

I am feeling better this week. After screwing up my blocking completly, I finally got to understand what animation is about.

This is a splined version of my failed blocking with some parts done with the new workflow. I have to put more breakdowns on the end bit and blend the poses a bit better on the jump sequence.

I am having a good time animating in Max but in 2 weeks it is time to go back to Maya in order to use the rig provided by the school (more later). Hopefully by then a new release on Maya with a 21st century arc tracker will come out ;-).

September is coming, I can’t hold my guns anymore and decided to splash out all my savings in what will allow me to achieve great work. I therefore bought a new Wacom Intuos3 for which I completly customized the “ExpressKeys”. I am able to animate entirely from the tablet. The “Expresskeys” have been remapped to do CTRL, ALT, Shift, Alt+W, open the Graph editor, go full screen, and navigate frame by frame using the slider. This is just heaven! The tablet will also help me to give life to my models using Zbrush and some fancy software just about to be released 😉

Last but not least, I have also decided to replace my Sempron 2.6Ghz with a decent processor in the shape of the new Intel Dual Core 2, due to come out this week. I have set my eyes on the 6600 for about £220 this is not cheap but reading several reviews and benchmarks… THIS IS A KICK ASS PROCESSOR!!!! 😉 I will also have to buy a new Mobo and some ram but the upgrade of my machine was long overdue.

What else… I am working on a new website www.monza-interiors.com the backend is pretty much finished with some fancy php/mysql oh I should actually give a link to this website we did a while ago. www.stagknight.com we got really disapointed when we saw the trailer and I am not sure we will ever see the colour of the money we were promised… Anyway the website is nice, only frontend stuff in flash.

Here is what I handed in today…. bad workflow…. This was using my mocap workflow, I will probably have to redo it from scratch using a proper animation workflow.. I didn’t even have time to work on the eyes and with this technique this is gonna be too painfull so we will see what I decide tomorrow…