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