The animation with a .... je ne sais quoi!
Comparison Reel
He did it again! If you missed Annie nominated Jeff Gabor‘s “Horton hears a who” comparison reel, make sure you check out his new Ice Age 3 comparison reel and …. something I had never seen before, a day by day shot walkthrough so you can check how he goes from layout to final polish step by step in 33 days.
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[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.
As a follow up to my last post, here is an attempt at understanding timing by comparing animation timing to musical timing.
From the age of 7 to 15, I received an intense classical music training which allowed me to tell if a score was being played at 60, 120 or 180 bpm without much difficulty.
I am much older now but I realised that if I were able to do the same thing again, I would have a serious advantage compared to other animators. I am not one to keep stuff for myself so let me share with you a little secret. This might be a bit tedious to read but bear with me, this should be an invaluable little trick.
When you start learning music, the very first thing you have to get used to is to hit, one beat, two beats, three beats and four beats per second. “Sounds great but how can this help me Mister Fancy pants?”
Well the first thing you need to do is to train yourself to count one second. One easy way would be to look at at a clock and say “one thousand” everytime the big hand hits a second. After a while this will become a second nature.
Now, to divide that second in smaller chunks I have an other trick. You use a hand gesture going, up and down for 2 beats, down, right and up/left for 3 beats, and down, left, right, up/left for 4 beats.
In bpm (Beats per minutes) this translates to 60 bpm for 1 beat per second, 120 bpm for 2 beats per second, 180 for 3 beats per seconds and 240 for 4 beats per seconds. How can we relate this to animation?
Simple. At 24 fps:
– one beat per second is one beat every 24 frames
– two beats per second is one beat every 12 frames (divide 24 by 2)
– three beats per second is one beat every 8 frames (divide 24 by 3)
– four beats per second is one beat every 6 frames (divide 24 by 4)
Here is a summary that you might want to print next to your computer screen.
With a bit of practice, just like Richard Williams, you will be able to go to the nearest park and see motion in animation beats. Go out, get some fresh air and experiement.
Have fun, hopefully this will help you too.
[update] I don’t use the GI joe script anymore and now go with Mental ray GI preset. I no more use Lluis Llobera Reset Channels script anymore, I just zero things out in the Maya channel editor.
I created a set of icons for the mel scripts I use the most. Click on the picture to download them all and also a nifty Xsheet script someone created for me.
Gi_Joe lighting script for cheap Global Illumination
Michael Comet’s autotangent download the whole cometScripts.zip pack and only extract autoTangent.mel He also has some cool parenting scripts but that’s an other story. [update] I currently use a hotkey for that one since the only value I use is the magic 4.2
Luis Llobera Make button and Reset channels. LLMakeButton IS A MUST!!!!!!
Zoomerate great to zoom and pan into your camera view without moving your shot camera. Perfect when animating fingers or eyelids in the camera view.
Tween Machine by Justin Barrett. An other must have script!!! It allows you to create linear breakdowns while in step mode and favour the previous or next pose. I just upgraded to version 2. The new interface takes a bit more screen space but you now have the option to use buttons or a slider, great for people suffering from RSI.
An other script I use all the time is Aaron Koressel ackSliceCurves. I use it so much that instead of a button I just use “Shift + b” as a hotkey, b being the “set key” hotkey for me. This script is great if your default tangents are set to step.
ackSliceCurves
Xsheet is a little mel script someone on CG talk created for me. The script tells you on the viewport how far you are from the previous keypose. Great to learn about timing.
Related post:
Animation hotkeys
I still haven’t set my mind as if browsing Youtube.com is a waste of time or not but one thing for sure is that it allows us to find Animation Treasures that we would have missed otherwise.
A selection for this week:
9 Old mens’s Ward Kimball interview on Disney Channel
Richard Williams – I Drew Roger Rabbit Part 2
Take your time machine and have Richard Williams give you a lecture on walk cycles live from Soho Square in London.
Last but not least, Glen Keane.
And Roger Rabbit’s rookie animator James Baxter… I call that genius.
Let’s thank Sheridan’s student Alan Cook for all those treasures and don’t forget to check his blog, he has got an ton of animation student’s blog linked.
Olive
