Third Week Means Blocking Pluuuus!

Haaaaallo! You are looking mighty fine this week, readers. Is it because of all the crazy baseball that's been happening? I've had four separate heart attacks during these playoffs so far, just FYI. But you aren't here for Giants talk! You're here for animation funtimes. And you are going to get it, friends! Though, if you want to talk baseball in the comments, I'm totally open to that. 

This week our assignment was to continue working on our shot and do a "blocking plus" pass. Now, this pass means something different for every animator, it appears. My mentor said this pass usually only takes him a day to a day and a half, so it's slightly odd that AM gives us an entire week to do it. He also said it can go one of two ways: 

1) Your blocking pass is in good shape, so for blocking plus, take it into spline and start finessing. Go into it with a "finaling" mindset, sort of like you're polishing up your blocking pass . Add in things like overlap, drag, follow through. 

2) Your blocking needs to be heavily reworked, parts may need to be redone completely. In this case, stay in stepped and address your notes, re-blocking what needs to be re-blocked. 

Fortunately, I was in category one for this week, so I splined up my blocking pass and dove in. But before I splined I addressed Marlon's notes, which were generally positive. He just asked me to bring down Ballie's foot a little on the second step and fix a few of the weird ankle poses I had going on. And not to forget to attach my video reference next week. Oops. 

I'm quite happy with how this one came out. Turns out planning really does help you work faster. Who would have thought, right?

Marlon also urged us to not feel put down if we had to re-block. He said it happens to him all the time at Disney. Very rarely, in fact, does a director give him the go ahead on his first blocking attempt. Notes are meant to help and as I'm finding out, they nearly always do!

Okay lovelies, I have to go rest up for all the San Francisco sports games tomorrow. See you next week!

Week 2 - Blocking!

Hello lovelies! I hope you are having a good week and are just excited as me about all this fall weather. For Week two we dove right into Maya to block our shots in. So GET EXCITED!

In our lecture this week, we had a workflow demo from Dimos Vrysellas, who had originally been trained as a 2D animator. Because of his traditional animation training, his approach to blocking was still largely the same as it had been when he was doing 2D. Throughout the lecture, he urged us to treat every key you set as if it's a drawing. In fact, he still refers to his keys as "drawings". For me, this approach was eye opening.

First, he laid down a posing pass, which focused solely on the storytelling poses with no mind paid to the timing. Using the comma and period keys in Maya, he flipped and rolled his keys, the same as a traditional animator would do with his or her pegged paper on animation board. After that, he started a new pass just to work out the timing of the shot, sliding the keys around in the timeline until it felt right.

I've always flipped my keys when blocking, but the idea to do a pass that focused only on posing was a powerful new idea for me. In the past I've usually focused on posing and timing equally in one pass, but for this assignment, I tried Dimos' method of separating them into two passes and I found it extremely useful. I think it really helped the clarity of my shot. Plus, timing it out doesn't seems so scary when your poses are already singing. But here see for yourself!

Something else that was stressed in this week's lecture was to be very thorough in your posing, even in your initial blocking. Don't shy away from putting in overlap, follow through and pay attention to things like foot placement, toe drag, ease-ins, ease outs and holds. I took that to heart and as a result, this is definitely the most thorough blocking pass I've ever done and I'm quite happy with it. Splining this shot seems waaaay less scary.

Well that's all for me this week, loves. Though I will leave you with a little teaser of what's to come: I'm cooking up a little side project in the form of a new blog. I'll update here as things get rolling so keep your eyes open! See you next week. 

Week 1 - Turning It Around

Hello lovely readers and welcome to Class Two - Psychology of Body Mechanics! We're off and running here in week one, with our first assignment already underway.

The way this term is set up, we'll be working on more complicated shots for four weeks at a time, so by the end of the class we'll have three complete shots. For each shot, we have a list of physical actions to choose from, ranging from simple to more complex in terms of body mechanics. But first, I have an updated workspace photo for your eyeballs:

I moved into a new house during the break week and finally got a new desk in addition to my drafting one. So now I have a L shaped setup with my drafting desk on my left and I am loving it so far! And of course, my second monitor is still the light of my life. Animators of the world, dual monitors are a must, I'm telling you. You'll wonder how you ever got anything done without one.

Okay now WHO'S READY FOR SOME AWKWARD VIDEO REFERENCE? Good because you're about to see some. For my first shot this term, the action I chose was to have Ballie do an about face. I quickly found out that there is a lot going on in what seems like such a simple action. Part of our homework this week was to shoot video reference of ourselves doing the action, or else find some reference of someone doing the action. Since one of our proposed options was a roundhouse kick, I'm guessing a lot of people ran to YouTube to see what they could find but since I chose a very doable action, I decided to just shoot it myself on my phone.

After turning around for the camera about a half dozen times, I decided on this take. I liked the rhythm and casual-ness of the timing and I think the foot placement is more interesting than anything I could have come up with out of my head.

For the other half of our homework, we had to submit 2-3 pages of planning sketches to help us when we start blocking our shots in next week. This part was actually really fun. Marlon shared with us that when he does planning thumbnails, he usually starts by tracing key poses from his video reference in Photoshop, and then refining the drawings from there. I really liked this method as a starting point and used it for my thumbnails here. After tracing off my reference, I redid the drawings to match Ballie's proportions a bit better and pushed the poses a bit more. 

Please forgive my little kid handwriting. During my move last week, I found a bunch of school work from elementary school and my handwriting has seriously not improved since I was twelve. Maybe I really should have been a doctor, huh?

Since I had a bit of extra time this week I also did a pencil test of my shot as well. I wanted to check how my timing felt and I like to practice my 2D skills whenever I get the chance. 

The timing of it feels a little mushy to me now watching this back but I think it may be partly because in some spots I needed really tight inbetweens and I didn't quite pull it off correctly. 2D is something I really want to get better at while I'm at AM so I'm going to try and do pencil tests along with my planning whenever I can.

Well, that's it for Week One! I'll be back next week with my first pass at blocking my shot in so stick around!

Class Two. Let's do this.

I've decided that this post-a-picture-of-my-face-during-week-one thing is going to be a tradition, so brace yourself for four more of these in the coming year.
But for reals, I am so stoked for Class Two! Maybe also a little scared, can you tell from my crazy eyes? I had my first Q&A yesterday and Marlon seems like he is a great mentor. Plus, I know most of my classmates through our AM facebook group already, which is pretty neat.

Towards the end of the hour he did bring up the fact that while AM is so often happy faces and rainbows and sunshine, the truth of the matter is that not all of us are going to get to the level of skill needed to work on feature films. He said most of his students have their sights set on Pixar/DreamWorks/Disney but by the end of AM, many of them are simply not ready for the big studios.

Basically, if we want to the top students in our class, the ones who get picked up straight from school, we have to get our butts in gear starting right now. Our reels need to be top of the line and we need to be getting As consistently on our assignments.

Of course, that's the way any school works. And all of us knew this in the back of our minds, I think. Though, it seems that at AM it's easy to forget sometimes. The staff is so encouraging and caring and energetic, and the work in the student showcases is always so incredible that it seems like if you can just find your way into this school, you too can be magically transformed into an incredible animator!

Like anything though, there's no magic transformation, no special pill, no silver bullet. It's practice and hard work and long nights and frustration tears when Maya crashes, and with a bit of luck and good timing, all of it will pay off in the end. And maybe it won't be your dream studio. But really, would you rather be doing anything else?

So thank you to Marlon for taking off the sugarcoat for us. As the youngest of three children (and the youngest of a generation of eleven on my mother's side), I can from experience say that kid gloves only hurt you in the long run.

Maybe this is discouraging to some people, but I'm choosing not to take Marlon's advice that way. Sure, a dream job at one of the big studios is something I've longed for since I was sixteen. But this industry is getting more competitive by the year and there is a lot of talent out there. I've been thinking about it a lot lately and working in a film studio, a small studio, going abroad, working in games, TV, commercials, or freelancing all have distinct pros and cons and I don't want to set my sights on any one of them just yet. As long as I get to animate, I'm in.

Class One? Check.

Well we've arrived at Week 12, which is insane. I feel like I just started AM and I'm already done with a full term! Wut.

For this week, we had to compile a progress reel of all our Class One work and upload it to the student site so that our new mentors for next term could get a feel for our strengths and weaknesses going in. My most dedicated readers will have seen this in bits and pieces already, but if you missed anything, here is all of my Class One work:

And with that, Class One is done! I had a great experience this term. My mentor was great, my classmates gave fantastic feedback, and I learned a ton!

I've got next week off for a break week between terms but next Monday I'll be back! My Class Two mentor is Marlon Nowe, a supervising animator at Disney who is currently working on Wreck-It Ralph, which I am so excited for. Wah! See you soon, lovelies!

Week 11! Almost there!

Okay, I know that it's technically Week 12 right now and I'm late in posting this week but I won't tell anyone if you won't, okay? Okay.

Our main assignment this week was to finish up our personality walk and add, for the very first time, a perspective camera angle! Hooray! Here is what I came up with for my 3/4 perspective view of my lazy walk with our friend Ballie. 

And, for our very last posing assignment, we had to communicate "balance". This one, like the strength assignment, was easier in some ways because balance is communicated almost completely through body language anyways, so Stu not having a face wasn't such a hindrance. Plus, it was fun to think up balance-y situations and draw them. Like these!

If it wasn't for So You Think You Can Dance being on right now (go Eliana!), I don't think I would have thought to  use dance photos as reference for these drawings. The dance drawings, along with the other balancing act ones came out pretty well, I think. After picking out some favorites, I posed Stu accordingly:

I think this actually may be my favorite batch of poses of the term. Stu's big melon hardly even got in the way! After some peer feedback, I decided to go with D:

My mentor was quite pleased with this pose and with my walk. I'm happy to have ended this term's work on a good note. All I have left to do is put together my progress reel compiling all of my work from Class One. I'll post that up tomorrow so keep your eyes peeled!

The Most Exhausting Week Yet

Lovelies! Hello, hello. So glad to have you here with us during Week 10. It is a doozy, so buckle up. I'll ease you in with a revision of my vanilla walk from last week:

My only note for this was to fix his slight lurch as he moves forward across the screen and delay his up and down translation just a touch. Other than that my mentor was pleased! Okay on to the good stuff now.

This week we got our very first shot at a character walk, which was both exciting and overwhelming. For the first time this term, we were pretty much given free reign. Our only stipulation was to do a walk with some kind of personality. My first thought was, "that leaves me infinite options HOW AM I GONNA CHOOSE?!" Then I thought about our pose assignment this week, which was to communicate "exhaustion" (more on this later). So, I thought doing an exhausted/lazy walk might be fun. After filming myself slumping around my backyard for reference, here is what I came up with for my blocking pass:

Ballie, such a lazy bum. Now onto the drawings! Like I said, this week's pose is "exhaustion." Here are some sketches of poor tired Stu. I took a nap in the middle of doing these, you know, for research. 

Here are some of my favorites done with our pal, Stu. His head is still enormous and unwieldy, if you were wondering. 

Okay, readers, vote away! Which Stu looks the most exhausted? Please let me know and I'll be back next week with a finished personality walk and another round of drawings!