Oh hello! Look how on time I am this week, you guys. Super on top of it.
So, for this week, we continued working on our shots, heading into rough blocking. I am very happy that we get to split up our blocking over two weeks, so that we can address notes in the coming week without having to worry about going out of stepped just yet. Take a look!
Still pretty messy but I like how it's shaping up, especially across the cuts. Looking at it now I think I might have put too much overlap on his body when he's swinging in the third shot, but it's always easier to reign it in than push it further, so I pushed it more than I normally would have. We'll see what Mike thinks of it tomorrow!
Aaaand Lady Animators has a few new interviews up if you want to take a look! Most recently I spoke with Amelia Lorenz, an animator at JibJab and all around lovely person. Okay lovelies, that's all for this week. See you next time!
Greetings, lovely readers! Here we are already in Week 2, which means I've begun blocking my first shot of class three. If you remember, Stewie has taken it upon himself to learn parkour and is doing a wall-flip in this shot. I even dressed him up like a ninja in training! Take a look:
I had a very busy week but I think the blocking is looking fairly good. I didn't get to clean it up as much as I would have liked but I think if I put in the time next week, it'll turn out well. We'll see what notes Mike has in crit tonight but hopefully he's happy with the flip itself, that was one of his major notes last week. Welp, have a good week, lovelies and see you next time!
Lovelies! Happy Turkey Day to you all! I stuffed my face full of soooo much food this last week and I hope you did too. I also animated a bit of course, but I will say these past two weeks have been busy and it's been a bit tough staying on top of school stuff. As a result, I'm behind schedule with this shot, and it's still in blocking this week:
Marlon hit the nail right on the head during his feedback this week. He said it seemed like I'd been really busy for the past two weeks with CTN and Thanksgiving, and I hadn't put in as much time as usual. Week 9 kind of snuck up on me and I didn't anticipate having so little time for AM last week. But with family visiting, a major holiday, work, and my mother's birthday, my week was jam packed.
Marlon gave me a much needed kick in the butt during my e-critique, reminding me that I needed to really push myself and make the most out of my time at AM. So, I'm kicking it into high gear this week and catching myself up so that I can finish the term strong. Still lots of work to do on this shot, but I'm excited to start digging in! Come back next week to see what I've done with it!
OKAY SO HI. It's been an insane whirlwind couple of weeks and I am about still coming down from my CTN high so please bear with me!. I've been slacking a bit, I know. But now you get two weeks worth of homework all in one post! Brace yourself.
To ease you in, I'll show you my polished Stewie run (from two weeks ago):
Marlon was quite pleased with this and only had a minor note or two on how I could polish it further. I had a bit of a rough time with shot through the middle part of my workflow (namely Blocking Plus) but I am overall quite happy with the finished product. Not bad for my first run, all things considered.
In addition to polishing our shot, we also had to plan our next shot in Week 7. For this last shot, Marlon gave us the go ahead to do something a little wacky if we felt like it. So, I ended up deciding on doing a shot with Stewie trying to pull the sword from the stone, but it won't budge (a variation on the popular "trying to open a stuck door" shot). He pulls and pulls, and ends up breaking the handle off the sword. I figured, it'll be a funny little story and a good body mechanics workout.
So I went to town on one of the door handles in my house and cut together the best bits for my video reference.
The weird cuts are there to make it fit within the frame limit, but overall I liked the buildup and the general idea of the poses, but I knew that I was going have to modify/push the poses quite far from the reference. So, since I had time and I knew CTN would take up my upcoming weekend, I did a little pencil test of my blocking to get a head start:
I liked this much more as a base to go off of once I got Maya open and plus it was really fun to do. From this and my video reference, I did some planning sketches. We had a lecture on force in drawing this week, which was really helpful to me in drawing my poses for this shot:
I hope you are still enjoying my chicken-scratch/fifth grader handwriting.
Okay! Onto Week 8! Here is my (rough) blocking from last week. For this shot, we have an additional week and Marlon told us we could use it wherever we wanted. Because of CTN, I chose to use mine this week and spread my blocking out over two weeks since I knew my weekend was going to be jam-packed and I would have only a little time for animating. ANYWHO, here is what I was able to get through before the deadline hit:
This is quite a bit rougher than I would have liked, though I was able to see Marlon at CTN and warn him accordingly and he was very understanding. I've already gotten feedback on this and he is mostly giving me acting notes at this point, which is encouraging since thinking about acting in Class Two is a bit ahead of the game.
Whoo! Okay that concludes this double header post. CTN is going to get a post of its very own so be on the lookout for that soon! It's gonna be a GOOD ONE.
It was another busy week, readers! My big brother turned 30 so I hopped on a plane to Vegas to celebrate, and consequently had less time that normal to work on my shot (I know the title says live from Vegas but I'm actually home now sshhhhh). I was waaaay too busy staring at the INSANE Transformer Halloween costumes that I saw while I was there. Seriously. There is someone in Vegas right now in an eight foot tall fully functioning Bumblebee costume that can actually turn into a car. I know. I saw him. Or her.
But I did manage to squeeze in a bit of time for school and block in my shot. I made sure to fly home on Saturday afternoon with plenty of time to clean up what I had done earlier in the week and this is the result!
Pretty pleased with this. My mentor advised the camera move so that Stewie wasn't so small in frame at the beginning and end, which I think is great advice. I still have have a hard time deciphering how timing will look once I spline my shots but I like how the timing of the shot's feeling now, though I may speed up a few bits and see how it feels next week.
BONUS: I had a bit of free time today before I watched the Giants win the World Series (WHOOOOOOOOO! Two World Series wins in three years! Panda with the MVP! Romo was crying! Buster looked cute as ever!) So I added a few tweaks to my shot with Ballie that Marlon suggested and I rendered a nice, pretty version of it.
And that's all for this week, readers. Come back next week for some splinage, and have a happy Halloween in the meantime!
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.
