Finally feeling comfortable....

Well it's week 3 of class 3... weird eh? Anyway, I spent a lot more time planning out my pantomime assignment than I have will all other previous assignments. And holy crap, what a difference it makes. I started by brainstorming 5 different ideas, once I narrowed them down to one idea I started thinking about what and how I want to show it. Acting and thumbnailing out ideas and poses. After I felt comfortable with my movements I filmed the video reference. After that I thumbnailed the video reference to get a better sense of the timing. Thennnnn, I cleaned up the thumbnails as best I could in Photoshop and brought them into a program called Monkey Jam, which basically helps you with the timing of your shot, bringing in the rough poses and using only the main key frames I timed out the shot, which was a little more work, but made blocking so much easier. After getting my first critique from my mentor Jay Jackson (who's been in the animation industry for 25+ years now, and worked on some of my favorite movies) I made some changes, added and took away from it.

My point is this, after living, breathing and learning animation over the past six months, I still have a long journey ahead of me, but I'm finally feeling comfortable and confident when doing animation. The school is great, everyone is so supportive and helpful, between that and my eCritiques it's a wonderful learning environment!

Tah tah for now...
Oh, I finally saw Ironman... very cool movie, I recommend it.

Week 2, class 3....

Man oh man, how time flies... I started working on my pantomime shot and am really excited. I feel like I'm learning a lot about animating and that I still have so much to go. Looking back to the beginning of class 2, I've learned so much since. I feel a lot more confident that I'm able to animate more and have it be successful and entertaining. For this assignment we're supposed to show two contrasting emotions in with no dialog what so ever. I had five options and went with the one where my character Stewie has a pet 'Tailor' in a crate that he adores. He picks it up and holds/hug it, and then hears something behind him and puts Tailor back in the crate, as he's turned away Tailor makes a run for it and hops out of the crate and runs away. When Stewie turns back around he notices that Tailor is gone, he panics, looks in all direction, see him and runs after it. It sounds simple, and that's the point, pretty much since the first week AM has been saying keep it simple, and that's what I'm doing, with a lot more planning. I took my sketches into Monkey Jam and timed everything out, to get a good sense of timing, to make sure that everything reads and is entertaining. It worked, they were right, the more planning that you do the easier it is once you get into the computer. Definitely a milestone for me and my animation world.

So that's about it for now. Busy as heck, I think Maddon's getting some teeth coming in... he's drooling everywhere. But overall he's a pretty happy little dude and a lot of fun to be around. He's rolling over, so we had to get him a 'baby-wedge' for when he's sleeping.

Till next time.