Thursday, June 18, 2009

Animation Mentor: Class 309-311


First off..I know I've missed a few weeks. It's be hectic and that's why I'm JUST now getting to posting the last few weeks. My apologies to those still loyal followers. I will try to keep you more up to date. I didn't realize I'd been SOO lacking in feeding you some animation! well..feast away!!

Week 309

This was Memorial Day week..and after a great rested "holiday", I got to work on my shot. This week, like most, was just pushing further into my shot. I really just took the notes from Marek and tried to incorporate them. You'll notice I'm still in blocking mode. I really tried to make my key drawings (poses) to be as strong as I could. I was really trying to get this as far as I could so when I got into spline mode (where it gets smoother and the inbetween frames are created) I was ahead of the game.

But for now, here's the blocking plus stage of my shot:



This week we also had to pose our characters hand in a RELAXED pose. I tried to find a new pose that really worked well, but ended up finding the best one being one that was actually similar to one in my shot. Take a look:


Week 310

This week was the biggie. I took my notes from Marek and reworked some poses and that took most of the week. But I really REALLY needed to get into splines this week, so I really pushed to get that done on Saturday night and the wee hours of Sunday morning. It's rough, but it's coming along. Because of all the work on the poses and my breakdowns, it made sliding into splines a whole lot easier. I also really try to jump back and forth from stepped mode (what I do my blocking in) to splined mode throughout my animating process. This way I can see if arms are going to go wonky or something is really off. It also helps me with keeping my timing tighter when I make the transition.

Here's the "refining" stage of my shot:



This week, the other part of our assignment was to pose our characters hand in a SURPRISE position. This was a tad hard, because I didn't want to do the generic, cliche poses, but to be honest..it was hard when my character IS cliche! lol! But here's what I came up with:


Week 311

This week was the biggie! My final week of work on the shot before the end of the term. I needed/wanted to get the shot as far polished as I could. I know it might be hard to notice what has been done in some areas, others might be more obvious. Unfortunatly, I still had to make some corrections with the last part because my mentor just didn't think it was working quite yet. Luckily, this week I got my e-crit from Marek on Sunday (a rare thing for me!!) and I started on making the corrections on Monday. I was really wanting to get a public review up before our Q&A on Weds. I had a great work day on Tues and was REALLY feeling good about the week. I also did NOT want to have another all nighter on Saturday night, so I really worked the rest of the week to tweak the heck out of this shot. By Friday I felt I had addressed all the notes from my mentor (he'd given me some more thoughts based on my PR on Tuesday), as well as the comments from other "fresh eyes" around campus. I had wanted to really be able to just really do some fine tuning of the shot on Saturday and then submit it still Saturday night. I was able to do that..and even had time to hang out with a good AM buddy for a while on Saturday night.

Here's this weeks assignment, check it out! *NOTICE* The mouth is NOT animated because I didn't need to animate it this term and I didn't want to just start throwing a puppet mouth on my animation in the 11th hour and have it screw the whole thing up! so..next term, my little animated socialite WILL SPEAK!!



It's been a LONG fix/six weeks on this shot. I honestly didn't know if I'd be at this place on it at the start. I've still got a ways to go to add the facial and lipsync next term, but I'm ready for it! But I'm also ready for the week and a half break we have. All I have to do is hopefully fix any things Marek sees in this weeks assignment and then put together my AM Progress reel..but that's another post!

Thanks again for checking in with me...and feel free to let me know ur out there! But most of all..keep checking in as the weeks go!

until laterz!

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