5.28.2009

It's been a crazy month...

May has come on gone, now on to June. We had Maddon's first Birthday, then my Brother and Sister-in-law both graduated from college, a BBQ and trip to Vegas..... Now, the year is almost half over.... OH, and I forgot to mention creating my 30 second short in the midst of all that. The good news is that I'm back in the computer. Setting up cameras, texturing my models, blocking out my character. So that's a nice change (not that I don't love drawing, but I don't want to get rusty).

It was a stressful weekend. We traveled to Vegas and brought the baby, which was a lot of work (mostly for my wife). I worked from my laptop, not a good idea trying to keep files straight, texture maps loaded, sound effects, etc... So needless to say I got my assignment done, but now I have to start over. My Maya skills are very novice so I had some referencing issues and because I referenced in my character I was unable to use the GUI picker for him, and having that tool is irreplaceable. So I went back and set everything up right, and for the most part it's a lot better now than it was before. So I guess it was a lesson learned the hard way, and now I'm pretty much back on schedule.

I had to do the layout for the first third of my short last week, I did just over 10 seconds, and am planning on doing to about 22 seconds this week. One thing that I'm noticing is that once it's in the computer the timing has to slow down a bit so everything reads correctly. I am planning on posting my animatic here when I think of it.... and should be better about recording my progress. Stay tuned.....

5.07.2009

11 Second goal met... wow!

I finished another 11 Second Club competition. It was a great and unique competition. If you're not familiar with the 11 Second Club you can check it out at www.11secondclub.com. Basically they host a monthly animation competition that anyone who has the desire to animate can enter in any medium they choose, be it 2D, 3D, stop motion, flash, etc. I mentioned that this month was unique, for a good reason. Typically they post up a movie dialogue shot, some serious, some funny, some with 3 people conversing, 2 people conversing or just one person talking. So each month is different and fun. Well in April they decided to mix it up again and just do sound effects. At first everyone suspected that it was an April's fools day joke.... turns out it wasn't. It was brilliant, there was an amazing turn out 160 entries. Definitely the most amount of great animation I've seen.

I decided that I would go for it and enter, besides it's great practice and I need all the practice I can get. With animation it's easiest to practice if there's a deadline, that way you'll finish it (at least to a point where you could potentially put it on a demo reel). My goal for the month was to finish in the top 50. Typically I finish somewhere around the halfway point, or lower half, so needless to say it was a pretty ambitious goal. After going through the voting I was pretty intimidated. I kept thinking 'if I even get near top 50 I'll be happy, like I said there was some great animation and some fierce competition! How it works is they post a new audio file on the first of the month and you have till the end of the month to turn in the animation. Everyone who's a member to the site is able to vote. They arrange it so you're able to go through each animation, watch, vote and leave a comment if you want. Then after the 5th they tally up the votes based on the average score and then they rate them.....

I ended up coming in (tied with 2 other animations) at 48.... I was relieved that I made it. Anyway, without further delay here's the animation.


Oh, and my short film is coming along. I'm working on the story boards now, and realizing how tricky and complicated it is to be a director.... camera angles are super tricky to pull off!! I'll post my animatic next week once it's completed!

Maddon's first birthday is on Saturday... I can't believe how fast the past year has whizzzed by me... to think a year ago I was animating a simple pendulum.... Maddon and I have grown a lot in the past year...

Till then.