Time off

I haven't posted at all this semester. I've been busy, stressed out, and burnt out. To try and relieve some of my stress, I decided to take a short two-week vacation while I had a little over a month off from work.

I'm currently in Singapore. Because this trip was going to create two weeks of missed Animation Mentor work, I decided that it'd be better for me to take the rest of the semester off and start class 2 over again in the Spring (I feel like I've been struggling since this class began anyway). So, perhaps this blog will resume in April- but more likely I'll spend my time focusing on my assignments rather than blogging, which has been the case until now anyway.

So, to my former class 2ers, I bid you adieu. I'll be watching your work from one semester back.

Class 1 Finale

Tonight we had our final live Q&A session with our Class 1 Mentor, Bret Parker. She was awesome and I hope we get a chance to stay in touch. So sad that the semester is ending, but what a great semester it was. I did end up learning a lot, and I'm hoping that during my winter break I'll be able to polish some of the stuff I started in class. For now tho, I've still got a couple more assignments due and I'm currently focusing on that (I ended up getting a week behind while trying to figure out the vanilla walk...).

This semester was very hectic, and although I'm not even finished with my current assignments, I am looking forward to the next term with excitement. I will figure this "animation" stuff out eventually. I have to!

My fellow Bret Parkerians, I dub thee "The BretP Bunch":

Inspirational Movies

Back on Halloween, the Spline Doctors each posted the 10 most influential animated films that inspired each of them to become animators. This is a great idea. While the Spline Doctors are mostly 2D animation geeks (there's one stop motion film among them, and a couple of CG films), my influnences are far more varied than your garden-variety Disney or Warner Brothers feature film (a lot of the films they mentioned are the standard faire one studies in character animation school).

I'd like to share my top 10 here:

1. The Wrong Trousers by Nick Park- Stop Motion at it's finest, and a stellar story to boot. C'mon, you can't beat a Penguin who disguises himself as a chicken and goes out robbing museums, can you?
2. Creature Comforts by Nick Park- I was totally awestricken the first time I saw this wonderful short film. I already had a desire to do animation when I saw this, but this made me sit up and say "Woah! I want to do THAT!"
3. Balance - I first saw this academy award-winning short film at the 1989 Spike and Mike's Animation Festival. This beautifully simple short by Christoph and Wolfgang Lauenstein tells a simple morality tale and has Twilight Zone overtones.
4. Telltale Heart by UPA
5. Dimensions of Dialog by Jan Svankmajer
6. The Sandman by Paul Berry
7. 101 Dalmations
8. Bully for Bugs by Chuck Jones
9. One Froggy Evening by Chuck Jones
10. Dragon's Lair by Don Bluth

Aside from the straight-up Animated movies, I was heavily influenced by the animation in effects films. Films such as The Empire Strikes Back (AT-AT walkers!!), the Harryhausen Films, and of course, anything with wrestling stop-motion apes and dinosaurs (King Kong, Gwangi).

14 Points of Animation

1. Appeal in drawing
2. Staging (thumbnails)
3. Most interesting way? (Would anyone other than mother like to see it?)
4. Is it the most entertainning way?
5. Are you in character?
6. Are you advancing the character? (Giving the audience new insights)
7. Is this the simplest statement? (One idea or main idea of scene)
8. Is the story point clear?
9. Are secondary actions working with main action? (Don't change expression enroute)
10. Is presnetation the best for the medium? (Crispness, reads on screen)
11. Are you spinning cigar boxes? (Off base? Who else would do the scene this way?)
12. 2 dimensional clarity
13. 3 dimensional solidity
14. 4 dimensional drawing (Drag and follow thru)

--Frank Thomas

November already?

Happy November everyone. I can't believe it's already November, and we're now past the mid-term point. It's been few weeks since I've posted last. I've been having a tough time with the last couple of assignments, but I feel like I'm on the verge of a breakthrough on understanding a couple of the principles that I've always had some trouble with- effective and believable use of squash and stretch and overlapping action. I'm sure I'll get it eventually, it'll just some time.

I've been going through some of the photocopied animation notes that I've collected over the years. I'm going to start posting excerpts from them here on Animanatee, starting with "The 14 Points of Animation" by Frank Thomas (see next post).

Reflections on Session 4

After sitting in front of Maya all week at work, I decided that I'd try something a little different on my assignment at home- I decided that I'd do this lession with stop-motion. Using FrameThief on my iBook, a camera stand, and my old DVCam, I took over the living room and got to work.



A mere 15 or so hours later, this is what I came up with (there were many versions of each before I settled on these two):

Week 3 Revision
Week 4 Assignment

I got my critique yesterday, and I'll probably do some revision on the week 4 assignment this week. I'm not sure how that's going to happen yet, but I'm guessing it'll have something to do with rotoscoping and After Effects.

Long time, no post

I predicted that this was going to happen. More than a week has passed, and no posts! Well, to be fair, I have had a busy week. I got my assignment turned in at the 11th hour. Way too much stressing for such a simple assignment. If I'm not on the ball this week, this class may just kill me (and it's only going to get more hectic as we get further along).

So, what'd we do this weekend? Well, we animated a bouncing ball with the weight of a basketball and posed "Excitement."



Good news: I was promoted at work! I went from full-time color stylist and part time texture artist (with a hint of modeling here and there) to full time CG modeler/ Texture artist. Our former 3D lead is going off to work on Spider-Man 3, so he has passed the torch on to me. I spent most of last week busting my butt to prove that I could do the job, and I survived! Between Animation Mentor and this new job, I've suddenly got a life filled with Maya!

Bad news: I'm all torn up about Aardman Animation loosing it's archive of puppets and sets from past films. I'm glad I had a chance to see some of the puppets, props, and sets when they came to Cogswell a few years back- beautiful handcrafted stuff. Definitely a terrible loss for animation fans the world over.

Week 2 Assignment

We were to go out into the world and sketch gesture drawings of people, pick a sketch, and pose the character to match. Here are a couple that I came up with: