Animation Mentor: Week 102 - The Principles of Animation

Hey all! It's been an amazing first two weeks of Animation Mentor. I didn't post anything last week, cause there wasn't a ton to show...but tons to tell!

WEEK 1

The first week's assignment was simply to explore the AM campus and to fill out our profiles and post a photo so we could start to know people by there faces. We then also needed to introduce ourselves to our mentor. Did I mention that my mentor is Victor Navone, an amazingly awesome Pixar animator! First quarter and I hit the lottery. My weekly Live Q&A with my classmates and our mentor is on Weds. nights. The first one was amazing and we just each introduced ourselves and we got to know more of what we would be doing in this Class 1. I spent much of my extra time last week, getting to know other Class 1 students and reconnecting with people I'd met who are in higher classes. I also watched MANY Maya training videos and other videos around the AM campus.

WEEK 2

Sunday afternoon found the beginning of Week 2! I watched our assignment video and the weekly news video. I spent Monday watching people at coffee shops and at my work (a gymnastics club) and sketching poses that I would then choose the strongest poses to then pose our CG character STU in. One of the big things about AM is the ability to give and get comments and critiques on the work students do. I took full advantage of this feature. I was posting my sketches Monday night and asking for feedback from fellow students. Tuesday morning, I woke to find many comments and "votes" for my poses. I began taking a tally of what poses people thought were the strongest. With everyone's comments, I would then try to comment on their work. Here is the "one page" of my sketchbook of poses (click on the image to see a larger version):


This process went on throughout the week as I took the pose sketches through to a few CG Stu Poses. I kept going back and forth between a couple poses. One that many people really liked and one that was a close second..but one I liked better. I was getting tons of great feedback from other "freshman" as well as some "upperclassman". I felt early on I was pretty close to pushing the pose as far as I could, adding as much "life" as I can in the pose. This is key to a good animators job. Finding those golden poses and making them read clearly. Finally after a week of tweaks and comments and more tweaks, I decided on one of the two poses, uploaded it onto the site and wrote my mentor a note to go along with it. Here is the one I submitted, Pose "F":


And here's the runner-up pose, Pose "D":


Now I have a few hours till the start of Week 3!! Come back next time to see the next step on my journey through ANIMATION MENTOR!!!!

Until laterz!