My animation DVD collection

Posted on April 17, 2006  | Leave a Comment
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I was talking with my friend Carmelo and offered to show him my animation dvd collection. Some good DVDs like Monsters Inc collector edition, some less good but found on the market for cheap 😉 and some cult movies like Dark Crystal!

Animation mentor Session 201

Posted on April 17, 2006  | Leave a Comment
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Here is the planing for my new assignement: 180 degree turn using our character Ballie. Based on our video reference material we have to plan our animation due for session 204. This exercise look a bit like rotoscoping but in fact when in the blocking phase we are gonna start giving a bit more life to the animation.

202 Q&A

Posted on April 13, 2006  | Leave a Comment
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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.

Few Stu poses I worked on this week and Class 01 WIP showreel

Posted on April 2, 2006  | 1 Comment
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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

Class 201 Body Mechanics: My new mentor

Posted on April 1, 2006  | Leave a Comment
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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.

112 Final Q&A

Posted on April 1, 2006  | Leave a Comment
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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.

Revision 108 and Assignements 109 and 110

Posted on March 31, 2006  | Leave a Comment
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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.

Busy week

Posted on March 16, 2006  | Leave a Comment
Filed under Animation Mentor, Drawings, IT

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?

Walk cycle 108

Posted on March 5, 2006  | Leave a Comment
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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 😉

108 Q&A + life drawing

Posted on March 3, 2006  | Leave a Comment
Filed under Animation Mentor, Drawings

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.

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