First Week with Bishop

Just got a new rig to use in my classes! It's the Bishop rig and has full facial controls, fingers, eyes, and everything else you could want in an animated character!

So far it's been really fun to mess around with all the controls and emotions and am hoping to upload a weekly progress of the shot.

So here is Blocking week 1 of the shot. Lacking a lot of polish, no facial yet, and a little cluttered.

Pantomime Shot

Class 4 is underway and I finished one of the fastest assignments since class 1! Only had 3 weeks to work on this piece so it's nowhere near done but hopefully I grasped the idea of pantomime because it's time to move onto a full facially rigged character and acting.

Keepin it simple

So class 3 went off without a hitch and I took a long break from my computer which really helped me recharge my batteries. Here are my two shots for the class. I hope to polish them both up before CTN so I have some body mechanic shots to show anyone would like to critique them.

Anywho here they are!

Week 1 of my new assignment.

So I decided to let everyone see how a shot develops over the course of several weeks.

First you start a shot off with a rough idea in your head and some stick figure doodles. Once you have an idea you generally will record yourself doing the action or find some Youtube videos of the action.

Now your ready to head into your favorite animation program and start blocking out your shot. Blocking is usually pretty rough and it's goal is to give the director or whoever is paying you to see what the final animation will look like. Good blocking will clearly show what is happening in the shot and not leave anything to question.



So for my first shot here I chose to do a baseball pitch. If you watch it you should be able to figure it out without me telling you which means I did a good job. If you are having trouble understanding what is going on then I need to go back and make sure it communicates it clearer for my audience. 

After turning it in I did realize I wanted a bit more anticipation to the big pitch so I added a step and lean back before the leg goes in the air which you'll be able to see next week when I talk about Blocking Plus.

Until then!

I've been a bad blogger

I haven't been doing a great job keeping this up to date lately. I had a couple weeks off and just needed to recharge my batteries so to speak. I'm glad to be back and hopefully will try and throw something up at least every week.

First my final shot for class 2.

Unfortunately like most of my assignments I keep hitting that frame limit and I really felt I could have played with the timing a bit more with this one but that is something I will have to learn to deal with because I know for a fact that the industry as pretty strict standards when it comes to that.


Second is my Progress reel for Class 2.


That is all for now as it is quite late! I was brainstorming ideas for my theme for Class 3. Stay tuned to see what I choose! :)

Until next time!

Class 2 Project 2

Finally got away from that ball with legs to a character with no arms. Overall it was a big learning curve, learning to deal with the spine and head. I'm mostly happy with it although I do wish I had another week to really polish it. Also I would have like to add another camera angle so you can see what is happening on the diving board a little clearer but my mentor advised against it.

Now I'll be working on my final project for class 2 which deals with a fully formed character, which should be very challenging and fun!



That's all for now! :)

Awesome little animation

Great animated video my mentor showed during class. Wanted to share it here!

Will be posting my finished 2nd project sometime in the next day or two. Until then enjoy this awesome piece!


Thought of You from Ryan J Woodward on Vimeo.

Class 2 Assignment 1 Finish

Haven't posted in a bit due to my crazy schedule as of late. But being that tonight it looks like I'll get to bed before midnight I wanted to at least put my week 4 assignment up.

I was debating going back and fixing this one because of how horrible the legs ended up being. But decided against it to remind me why they are doing that and to never.do.that.again.ever.

Great progress Reels

Found some great videos of how a shot progresses from planning to polished and just wanted to share them here. I love these behind the scenes stuff!!

First one is by Kyle Kenworthy


Next two are from David Tart

Animation Direction: Shot Progression from David Tart on Vimeo.


Animation Direction: Sequence Progression from David Tart on Vimeo.

Project 1 Class 2 Part 1

Just popping in to throw out my blocking pass for the about face. Will be refining this over the next two weeks so stay tuned!

And that is a wrap for class one!

So I've finished class one at AM and am moving on to body mechanics starting next week!

This changes my schedule somewhat from starting and finishing a new shot every week to having roughly 4 weeks to plan and take my shot to its conclusion. So updates will be somewhat random and less frequent that they have been. Also a big difference is my assignments will start being a lot more interesting and I'll be able to really push myself.

So for my final assignment I just smoothed out my blocking from the previous week on my sneak.



For week 12 I had to compile all my shots into 1 progress reel for my next mentor to take a look at and give me an idea of where I stand coming into class 2. Overall I got a B average for the first class which I'm very happy about. Progress reel follows.





See ya in class two.

Busy Busy Busy

So I'm a bit behind in posting. Had some busy weeks with real life stuff and got very little sleep. Also really pushed myself on my shots the last two weeks studying and discovering all sorts of new awesome things about animation.

So onto the Week 9 stuff...my finished Vanilla walk and concerned pose.


Concerned: Will be revisiting this before end of term to change the lil guy's pose to more slouched. Maybe add some background colors or something.

Vanilla Walk: Overall I'm generally happy with it. Will probably revisit it to give it slightly better balance. 

This brings us to week 10!

This week is a personality walk and a pose featuring exhaustion.

Exhaustion: Very happy how this turned out. Mentor loved it and said was good as is.

Personality "walk": Well this was a lot of fun. This was the first assignment I completely custom created. I shot reference of myself then took that into my planning and really hammered out all the blocking poses I could. I learned sooooo much this week I can't even begin to list everything. The assignment just called for a personality walk which is basically take the vanilla walk and add rotation or a hip thrust or a double bounce. But being who I am I decided to go with something more original. Result is below :)

Overall very happy with week 10 and my mentor loves the shot and I'm looking forward to my last assignment for class one next week!

Week 8 The Vanilla walk part 1

This will be a quick update as I have no time!

So this week is the first assignment that will take place over two weeks. The assignment called for a plain vanilla walk. So blocking is when you pick certain important frames and pose them out to get a good sense of timing before you smooth out the animation later.

 

For the pose this week we had to show physical strength. Came up with this...



More to come!

Week 7

Yo! So It's been crazy this last few weeks trying to get these assignments done in time for the deadline and also satisfy my demands of myself. The last couple weeks I've gone right up to the deadline. This week I really pushed myself, and even planned out my shot a week in advance.

It's a good thing I did that because having a good plan from the beginning saved my butt. I spent so much time doing and redoing the tail in this animation that I wouldn't have had time to plan and re plan the shot and timing like I have in the previous weeks. There is really no good way to put it besides saying I started animating on Monday and played with it all week long and still barely made the deadline. I stayed up till 6am Sunday got 3 hours of sleep, then woke up at 9am to get a few more hours on it before the deadline.

And after all that I still wasn't happy with it. :(

I think I realized I may never be 100% done with an animation and I might just need to learn to be ok with that. In time...

I fully expect to revisit this assignment over the next week or two. So look forward to some revisions of this popping up over the next couple weeks.

Now onto... pictures!
So last week I posted my graph editor for the pendulum and I kinda liked the progression so I'm going to try and post them every week just to see the craziness! And this is only animating most of the shot in profile. This will easily become 2 times as messy when we start going into more 3d based animations. FUN!

Kickstart My Heart

This week really showed me how we are slowly ramping up the complexity in the shots we are doing week to week.  For example I took two pictures from Maya comparing my graph editor from my week2 bouncing ball assignment and my week 7 Zorro assignment.

 Very clear to read this one! Green line is the vertical motion showing the up/down movement of the ball. Blue shows the horizontal or momentum of the ball slowly easing down over time. Finally the red line just shows the general rotation of the ball. Well that's not so bad at all! Animation is easy! ^_^

What is this I don't even....

I must say I liked the increase in difficulty and am really looking forward to my critique this week.



I decided to go with simple again this week and decided to make my pendulum just do a slight Z action. At that point it became obvious my pendulum needed to be Zorro (Duh!). Also Zorro always gets away on horse so I had to add a horse (Duh!). Finally I added a little cheesy fire effect to sort of replicate the scene in Mask of Zorro where he lights the hillside on fire in a giant Z.

Planning....

Fairly simple planning.

By the time I got to the Z idea I had gone through about 3 Ideas. The first was just to move the pendulum from left to right which was oh so boring. Second I was going to try and have him swatting at a fly, problem with that idea was.... well I'm not really sure what happened I kind of just wanted to put a bit more story or emotion into my shot. Soooooo I came up with a whole dance routine between two different pendulums dancing to some salsa music. The idea was great it had some emotion some fun and interesting ideas, however I quickly realized to get the types of motion and quality I would require from myself that this project would take at least 2 weeks to plan and execute properly. So I scrapped in favor of my simple Z.

Next week we get to some tail action!

Hell week 5

This week really just about pushed me to my limits. I had numerous problems throughout planning and just getting enough time in the week to do my assignments.

The final product.


My planning went through many phases. 

This one was far too elaborate for the frame limit I got. Ended up being around 300 frames when I started timing it. The assignment called for no more than 120 so I ended up scrapping it.

 I could have potentially pulled this one off but I was having all sorts of trouble getting the correct weight and timing while on the ramp so I wanted to spend as little time on the ramp as possible.

For my pose this week I decided not to spend too much time on since 90% of my grade is the animation. Experimented with the introverted devastation as well as the overly dramatic to the slightly funny. #8 just had the top of his ice cream cone fall to the ground.... how sad :(

 Final Product:

Overall this week had me stay up far far too late. But I'm very happy with my critique and grade so it was totally worth it!

See ya next week!

Week Four

So this week has been crazy busy at work. So I decided to take Friday off to able to have 2 full days to focus on animation and perhaps a nice break before starting the next week.

So this week was all about timing and spacing which is unimaginably important for animating an interesting scene. I went through a lot of rough drafts with my bouncing duo including mid air collisions and having them land on top of each other, however I ended up using one of the more simple ideas which was to not have them collide pretty much at all. At this point my skills are not quite honed to be able to handle mid air collisions.

So I kept it simple for the animation.



For my revision my mentor said I went TOO far in my excitement pose so I toned it back with this new pose which he said had a more cultural familiarity with excitement.

Revised...

Barring any Feedback this will be my final work for week 4.

See ya next week!

Final Assignments Week 3

Well what a day I spent a solid ten hours animating, drawing, and planning for my assignment this week. Mostly due to the fact that by Friday I really only had my basic drawings planned out and my keys set for my bouncing ball (although I changed every single key I set).

So I will not let that happen again going to start a lot earlier in the week with a full planning and maybe a Stu pose before Friday shows up again.

Here is my work!

Week San (3)

Been busy this week so took me a little bit to get some ideas sketched out. Got my new Wacom Intuos4 today and decided it was the day to sit down and start drawing. I think I need a bit more practice as they don't look as good as last weeks in my opinion. Although that may be do to the fact I was trying to find other ways to express excitement without having the arms flailing in the air (harder than you may think with no face!).

So here's my first rough draft. I'll probably clean these up later in the week but I wanted to start getting feedback from what does and doesn't read or translate well. So here they are....

Will update later with my bouncingBall and final sketches and pose. 

Stay Tuned!

End of Week 2

Well its the end of the week and I've spent most of my Saturday in Maya, Photoshop, and Sketchbook Pro. However all the positive critiques I've gotten make me feel very good about turning in my first real assignment.

Big thanks to everyone who helped with the critique!

Looking forward to see what my mentor thinks and says about the poses and I can't wait to start week 3!

Animation Mentor Week 2

Well that first week sure was easy! Got myself a nice juicy A for the first week. Hey that's like 1/12th of my grade woohoo!

So now week 2 has begun and I'm actually doing some drawings, posing, and even starting up Maya. This weeks focus seems to be on the 12 principles of animation as described in the Illusion of Life and I must say it is a lot to take in. Lucky the mentors and instructors know this so they were very patient with us during Q&A this week in explaining and helping us understand how and why the principles exist. Also how to use and spot them in other animations as well as implement them in ours. 

So the assignment this week was to go out and draw! So for the past two weeks I've been staring at people a lot (creeeeepy) and just noticing different stances and getting ideas for what I want to pose out. My first drawing ended up looking like this...

I immediately bought a drawing book after this I swear! (I really did!)

I got good feedback on poses 1, 3, 4, and 5. So I'm going to go back and maybe strengthen or elaborate on those 4 poses tonight/tomorrow and hopefully get some more feedback before I get into Maya and start messing around with Stu (Stu is the rig supplied by animation mentor). 

I'll update this blog probably Saturday or Sunday night with the rest of my week 2 work.

See ya space cowboy...

Update: More pics

Animation Mentor Begins

So I've finally decided to start filling out my blog and using it to track my journey to becoming an animator!

I decided that I wanted pursue animation about a year and a half ago when I learned that I could actually have a job that I would like and that would support me. I did a lot of research into how to pursue this goal and came up with the best solution for me. I found  animationMentor after searching around for the best ways to learn professional animation. When I first heard of animationMentor.com I was very skeptical, I even dismissed it outright since I thought an online school could never get me what I wanted. However after browsing the forums at cgtalk and 11secondClub it was clear to me this was no ordinary online school.

I was able to secure a loan with a reasonable interest rate around November of last year and signed the final papers in December 2011.

Today I had my first day of class and I must say it feels awesome to finally be taking steps to create an awesome career for myself. I look forward to updating this blog with my animated shots every week. I will always try and post something to show myself a year or two from now how far I have come, and perhaps inspire others.

For now I'll leave you with some of my first animated shots.
Viewer discretion is advised.

http://youtu.be/Th3hW43ejGo
http://youtu.be/NTUfemVUPzY
http://youtu.be/hHzDP1vcwy0
http://youtu.be/eIS1CcsfexY