Animation with a moustache Blog

Registerfly part II 0

Registerfly part II

At least I can comfort myself and say that just like 900.000 other Registerfly customers, I am victim of a huge criminal affair, the Registerfly story would make a great plot for a hollywood movie.

Just the short story, it is 2.45am and I am still trying to rescue my customers domain names and my own ones.

I will just quote this extract from counter official Registerflies.com website:

“Site Hacked and Data Corrupted

Attention everyone. I just received confirmation that the Registerfly site has currently been hacked into and taken over by Kevin Medina in the Florida officeI was asked to put this up here due to the amount of customers that are sending money. At this moment, they are trying to get police in Florida to arrest Kevin immediately..”

Yep the site has supposedly been hacked by their former CEO who took refuge in Florida where he would be still operating, putting in jeopardy a shy 2.000.000 domain names.

Registerfly, Mediatemple… 0

Registerfly, Mediatemple…

I am soooo tired about those 2 companies and hopefully complaining about it on my own website will not attract any censorship.

Registerfly for a start. Just DON’T BUY ANY DOMAIN NAME FROM THEM!!!! if you are lucky and only have one or two domains then you are gonna be fine but if you deals with several website and run into problems…. don’t expect them to help you out.

I used to use the ticket service to get technical support but after 1 week of being ignored I started to use their phone number (they used to have a chat application but it was too ridiculous) DONT CALL THEM! If you are lucky you will get an answer within few minutes, up to 45 minutes but just don’t bother, they will always tell you that they “are really sorry but their system is currently down and they can’t check anything right now but in 24h everything should be resolved”… I waited one week , I still get the same answer and the support ticket still hasn’t be processed.

You don’t know what to do? Well try GoDaddy.com for a start. I usually try to to resist advertising featuring women in skimpy outfit but the switch seem unavoidable.
Now, Mediatemple.net….. I have always found Dot net and Dot org domain names so ironical. In few situation I found website owner trying to buy some sort of respectability or friendliness by putting a .net or .org at the end of their domain name. Was Apple.net already taken when Steve Jobs embraced internet?

Mediatemple…..ok I can’t be bothered. Just for the sake of it, a short version. Where do you hear about Mediatemple? Surfstation.lu, Designiskinky, K10k.net. I was at recent graphic design convention and they were giving away free stickers expecting people to place them on their MacBookIntelOSXProDuoCore. Too bad I am on PC mate!

If you are involved with Graphic Design then yeah, you just can’t avoid them.

Two years ago, fed up with Rip off and unstable Webfusion/Pipex, I tried many hosting company and finally stuck my Mediatemple sticker on my PC… yeah under heavy brain wash how can you still resit guerilla marketing?

Ok yeah the short story. I have been with MT (sounds cool MT right? MT.net 😉 ) for about 2 years. First year was fine, second year was atrocious. I am a lucky bastard who happen to be on a server that still runs MySQL pretty smoothly but it wasn’t the case for other people. My problem then is not MySQL but email server related. They go down so often that I lost count. The funniest part is that they keep telling you that since they moved to “The GRID technology” (they haven’t done marketing school for nothing ya know! and look at the CG rendering of their so called Grid Servers? The two G5 they used for hosting probably wouldn’t have appeared serious enough) there shouldn’t be any downtime anymore….Downtime however do happen so they put new clusters and tell you “we added 40 new processor cluster bla bla bla so the situation should be resolved”. One week later they announce that they need to put 40 more clusters!!!! What a joke.

Oh yeah you can always take a dedicated server and try to trouble shoot their technical problems by yourself !

And for the fun of it read their System Status panel to see the biggest bunch of Mediatemple fans appraising the good work at their holly hosting company despite their website being down for more than 48h. Don’t expect to see my comments, they get edited out most of the time.

If you can afford to have your website down for more than 48h then you can surely add a .net or .org at the end of you domain name!

2 characters acting shot planning 0

2 characters acting shot planning

Here we go, we have now officially started the 2 characters acting shot, which will mark the end of Animation mentor’s first part training.
The 2 characters shot dialogue is one of the hardest things to do as it encompasses all the things we have seen so far: principles of animation, body mechanics and introduction to acting.

After selecting 3 interesting audio clips last week, we had to shoot the video references and work on the layout for that sequence.

The task is overwhelming. This is the first time we are gonna have to set few cameras and establish the cuts between them. Obviously we also have to make the two characters interact with each other in a believable manner.

Here are my video reference for this week (last week actually) and my 2d planning. I will show you the layout once I updated it, taking into consideration Morgan’s comments.

Video reference. This is something crucial to communicate in a rapid manner to your fellow animators or your supervisor what you are going for. It also allow you to explore different ideas and see what would or would ‘t work.

403.jpg

Preparation sketches. Sketches is an other way to explore ideas through thumbnail poses and sequences of thumbnails. I normally operate a back and forth between Sketches and Video reference.

sketch01.jpg
sketch02.jpg

Class 4 Facial poses 0

Class 4 Facial poses

Just like in Class1 where we had to try to replicate and enhance some cool body poses based from life with our Stu rig, we are now using Bishop to replicate facial poses based on pictures or movies.

Here is a selection of my various attempts. My mentor Morgan Kelly made few comments which I still have to address.

credit where it is due for the photographic references and especially Ambrel.net Home of the Vain 

foot.jpg

fantom.jpg

kid.jpg

girls.jpg

02_psycho.jpg

01_smile.jpg

01-and-02-submitted.jpg

the Bobby thing 0

the Bobby thing

funny-face.jpg

The Bobby thing is to manage to make a funny face just before you get cut off by the camera so your face stays on the screen till the next person comes on screen 😉

i managed to do the Bobby Beck thing today with my Alumni Tutor and great animator Fernanda Velozo (check Animation Mentor showreel to see her work).

403 acting shot 1 character 0

403 acting shot 1 character

403.jpg
Here is my latest assignment. I am very unhappy about the blocking but once you are in polishing it is too late to go back to it. I am now trying to make the most of it and learn from my mistakes.

Stretchy rig or broken Bishop? 2

Stretchy rig or broken Bishop?

broken-rig.jpg

Just when I am under pressure guess what I have to cope with…. look at his left arm and his ankle. This is what happen when a rig doesn’t want to behave…. Bishop has been severly bruised for not doing what I ordered him to do!

Hum… how do I fix that now? 😐

(it is interesting how much traffic this page is getting… a torrent of traffic actually 😉 )

Progress reel 0

Progress reel

title-card.jpg

let’s face it. I haven’t touched any of the shots for the past 3 month so I might as well just post it for real this time. There is still a lot of work but once I put it online I won’t have any excuses not to improve it anymore.

Do you see my title here? 0

Do you see my title here?

I need to blog about this. I went to get a credit card at the Natwest Earl’s court branch for a friend of mine who lives abroad and was told to ask for a specific member of staff.

When I enquired about it at the Information Desk I got told that I would need a letter to pick up a credit card.

I explained the situation very carefully and clearly and the fact that I was told to speak with a very specific member of the staff but she said the same thing: “no letter, no card”.

I don’t really have time to hang around in Banks and before heading home asked her if she was sure about it to which she replied.

“Do you see my title here?” pointing at her name tag…. It reads V. F. Customer Service Officer.

I am not too sure what kind of customer service we are talking about here but certainly not the kind of customer service I will ever want to be treated with. A person with a condescending attitude to me has got nothing to do with customer service.

Natwest Earl’s court don’t expect me to recommend you to anyone.

Back at AM 0

Back at AM

I am finally back at Animation Mentor after a break of 3 month. What did I do during that time? I think I made the most of it.

I spent 8 weeks with Keith Lango and the APT program, I tried to learn Zbrush and Maya a bit better, I also spent a bit of time with XSI and met plenty of great people.

I caught up with my friend Richard Helliwell (which I first met during the Anatomy for digital artists at Escape), Young Min, who used to work for me and who introduced me to Seung Ho Henrik Holmberg. Check out his blog http://henrik.cgcommunity.com/ he is a very talented artist who at 26 years old already worked for ILM, Dreamworks and now MPC. Yep… just that. I also met plenty of other crazy people that I won’t mention or you wouldn’t believe me. Let’s say that Soho is a very small place.
New year, new resolutions. Sleeping less, working harder! I even applied for an IT job at MPC but haven’t heard from them yet. I am trying an mad schedule, bed at 2am, wake up at 6am. Like I keep repeating to people who question my sanity, “if DJ can do it, why can’t I do it????” Well, I only started yesterday night and I am already feeling very tired 😉
Keith’s APT was excellent, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who really wants to push his animation skills forward. I didn’t have too much time for it unfortunately but I feel that he helped me greatly. I am much more confident now to approach a new shot. I finally know where I am going and I don’t feel lost like before.

My new mentor at AM this term is ex CalArt student Morgan Kelly http://www.morgankelly.blogspot.com/ who currently works at Dreamworks. I loved Flushed Away and hopefully he worked on it. Tonight 5am GMT is our first Q&A. Not too sure how I am gonna wake up yet but I will.

My Class3 one character shot really sucked but we will see how it goes.

I am also finishing some work on www.monza-interiors.co.uk and hopefully the website will go live tonight. I mainly worked on the backend and Sergio provided the template. It is the first time I am relying entirely on CSS for the design and I even tried a bit of Ajax. It is hopefully the last time I get involved into such a project and from now on I intend to only stick to 3d work. Animation obviously and also Modeling if possible. Mudbox, Zbrush, Modo2 made modeling so approachable that it would be a shame not to give it a try.
Regarding drawing, I won’t go to life drawing classes anymore as the ones here are not suited to animators. I picked up a few books, watched several 2d shots from Jason Ryan and few Glen Villpu lectures, tried my hand at 2d animation and I feel that I am on the verge of discovering the graal. I will tell you more about it later.
Keep an eye on this blog. Things will be revealed to you very soon 😉