Well, it happened. I finished Class Two! I had an awesome time this quarter and learned A TON. Marlon was a fantastic teacher and I don't think I could have had a better quarter! I can't believe that I'm one third through with AM. Before I know it, I'll be at the graduation BBQ, wondering how 18 months felt like two. Here is my progress reel, with all my Class Two stuff rendered allllll pretty for you:
Well I hope you enjoyed this quarter as much as I did, lovely readers. I'll be back in the New Year when Class Three gets going but until then, have a happy holiday season! Eat lots of cookies! See you soon!
Hello! So it's that time again, Week 11. Our very last assignment has been turned in and Class Two is drawing to a close! Already about one third done with AM?! Whaaaa?
Well I polished and polished and finally finished up my shot! Take a looksee:
Poor Stewie's never gonna be king. After hitting a few roadblocks with this shot, I'm quite happy with how it came through in the end. Marlon was as well, noting that I could just add a little bit of 'keep alive' with the holds to touch it up. In his end-of-term assessment he gave me great feedback, so I am a very happy camper with Class Two as a whole. Can't believe it's nearly done! All that's left is to put together my progress reel, which I'll have up in the next couple days so keep your eyes peeled, readers! See you soon.
Oh hey so I only have two weeks of school left WHAT?! I know I keep asking this but WHERE DOES THE TIME GO? Really. It's freaking me out. It's Decemeber! How?!
Admist all this freaking out, I did finally take my shot out of stepped, which was scary. But I think that I finally got out of that middle "I've forgotten how to do everything" phase now, and the shot is ripe to be fully polished next week. So I'm thankfully back on schedule! See for yourself:
Marlon asked me to change the ending so that Stewie stays in frame, and to do whatever I could to make the gag as funny as possible. After some invaluable feedback from Marlon and my peers, I decided on this ending, where he lands on his bum, because landing on your bum is always funny, duh. I'm pretty happy with it at this point, especially after kind of losing my way on this shot last week. I still have quite a bit of polish to do next week so come back soon to see what I do with it! Cheers!
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.
Where does the time go? I'm already half done with Class Two! How did that happen? I guess we'll NEVER KNOW. So, this week was significantly less busy than the last one, since I do not go to Vegas. BUT I did parade around in a Wonder Woman costume on Wednesday night, which was lots of fun.
And of course, I worked on my shot. This week moved in Blocking Plus, which is always scary and exciting. Things are really moving! But they look kind of bad! Make it look better! Ah! Keeping those four exclamatory sentences constantly in mind, this is what I came up with this week:
To be honest, this week was a bit of a struggle. I got a bit overwhelmed with cleaning up the graph editor, which was a tall order since I set so many keys when blocking. The is by and far the hardest shot I've ever done terms of physicality and I'm still seeing a million things I want to fix. And while it was hard, I'm proud of where I got though I think I've got a lot of polishing to do next week.
In other news, I've put up two more interviews over on Lady Animators! I spoke to Rachel Hanson and Julie Nelson, who both work at DreamWorks and are both fantastic, talented people. Click on over there to learn about how sad Rachel gets when the only "J" available at work for a PB&J is the orange marmalade flavor and read about allll the velociraptors Julie has animated.
Well that's all this week, loves. Come back next week for another double-header: my polished shot AND planning/reference for my next one. Whoo! See you then!
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!
It was a busy, busy week this week readers. We had so much to do! Polish our first shot, shoot reference for our next shot, and do planning drawings! Plus I went out of town this weekend to watch Cal take a very unfortunate butt whooping from Stanford. :( But, at least we're getting Missy Franklin on our swim team next year. All in all, I had lots to do. First off, let's look at my turnaround with Ballie, which is all polished for you!
Pretty happy with how this turned out. I my biggest hurdle with this shot was it feeling too soft initially. Even from Week 1 Marlon told me to watch out for floaty-ness in my work, since some of Class One work felt a bit floaty as well. I toyed with the timing of this shot a lot and I think the experimentation I've been able to do with it over the past few weeks has really helped train my eye to recognize better timing/spacing. I think the feeling of weight has improved a lot, even just since my blocking plus pass.
And now, it's time for more reference video! For our next shot, we are getting a new rig! His name is Stewie and he is pretty much just a fancier version of our old pal Stu, and thankfully his head is not quite as large and he has eyes! Yay! For the list of actions we could pick to animate, we had a lot of cool options, but I decided to go with "a run with a change of direction." I've had a lot of trouble doing runs whenever I've tried them in the past so I thought this would be a good challenge. On my day off this week I borrowed my dad's tripod, set it up in my backyard and ran around like a crazy person.
After doing about thirty takes of myself running around, sometimes from off camera, sometimes away from camera, sometimes toward it (I got soooo sweaty), I ended up piecing two of my favorite takes together (that's why there's that weird cut in the middle). I liked the takes where I ran into frame but I also like the little skid thing I did on the turnaround from another take. Thankfull, my mentor gave us the okay to piece together reference last week during the Q&A and I like how it came out.
Also, you may be wondering why I was running with my arms behind my back. Our Stewie rig for this shot doesn't have any arms, so I figured I shouldn't use my arms so my reference was as accurate as possible. Fun fact: running with no arms is really hard. Turns out swinging your arms is a tremendous help to gaining forward momentum and balancing as you change direction. Seriously. Go outside and try to do it without falling over.
So, since I had my reference all ready to go, it was time to do my planning drawings. I always liked how our mentors could draw directly over our reference and after a bit of googling, I found out that I could do the very same thing in photoshop! I got really excited and went to town on my reference:
I apologize that this is so annoying to watch this in real time (and on youtube you unfortunately can't scrub through it frame by frame). Also my color key is basically impossible to read, but black drawings are contact positions, green is up and down extremes, red is passing positions, orange is line of action/weight notes, and white is shoulder rotation extremes. I'm so excited that I figured out how to do this and if my shot turns out well, I think I'm going to add this in as a permanent part of my workflow!
Okay, now onto the drawings. From my drawn-over reference, I was able to lift all the appropriate poses for the run pretty easily and separate them into color coded keys, as you'll see in pages two and three. I pushed the poses a bit where I could, but looking at it now I know that I'm going to need to exaggerate them even more when I get into Maya. Something that I noticed while working on my last shot is that I had to speed my timing up quite a bit to get the weight to feel the same as in my reference. For whatever reason, the timing from live action doesn't directly translate into animation and if you lift the timing from your reference, things will usually feel too slow. I did some rough adjustments with the frame numbers I've timed out here on the first page.
That's all I've got for this week, darlings! I'm going to start blocking soon so that will be posted up in a few days. See you then!
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!
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.
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!
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.
