Woo! Finished Class 02 of Animation Mentor! Above is the final version of my last assignment for Class 02: both dressed and naked versions. I tried to make it cartoon-ier than usual, but I still got ways to go in terms of exaggeration, timing, and posing.
Here’s the process:
Onward to Class 03!
And if you want some animation inspiration go see “How To Train Your Dragon”. Saw it twice this weekend, and I wish I could’ve gone for a third. 😉
Hey, everyone!
Things are a little hectic with the whole settling into work and starting up Animation Mentor. Just wanted say how thrilled I am to be doing the program. My mentor for Class 01 is Anthea Kerou, who is an animator for Dreamworks, but she recently wrapped up work on Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and worked on numerous other features like Bolt and Horton. It’s so awesome because I definitely looked at her Bolt demo reel for inspiration when I was working on some human movement tests awhile back.
[singlepic id=68 w=320 h=240 float=left] Our first assignment was to do gesture drawings of people in public locations and then pose the school’s character, Stu, in one of those poses. Luckily there was a lot going on that weekend. I went to the local farmer’s market and then happened upon a jazz festival.
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For week 3, the Stu poses continue, but this time with a theme word. This week’s emotion was “Excitement”. We were allowed to grab poses from anywhere for these, so my source of inspiration was watching the TV show Glee and televised sports.
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But that wasn’t the meat of the assignment. Our main goal this past week was to animate a bouncing ball with the weight of a basketball or soccer ball from a side perspective only and no squash-and-stretch. We also had a frame limit of 100:
Even though it’s a bit of a struggle to balance a full-time job and school (and both in my field, no less), I’m glad I’m doing AM. The first few weeks have already taught me a lot. The posing exercises are especially helpful since that’s one of my weaknesses. I can feel my animation muscles getting progressively stronger after each critique from my mentor and my classmates. I just hope I can juggle it all! Any tips on that is greatly appreciated. 😉
I decided to give my website a major overhaul to facilitate updating my site. One of the major reasons why I didn’t update as much was because it was a pain to update everything from different sources (i.e. using Filezilla, hand coding HTML on every single page when making changes, logging into WordPress when updating, etc.) By placing everything under one umbrella, it should make the process easier.
This is all because of Animation Mentor, which begins in 1 week. By having an easy-to-update site, I can post my work and receive feedback quickly.
Let me know if there’s anything broken or if the font is too big. (I have a huge monitor so from my perspective, everything looks tiny.) Thanks!
I’m not dead! It’s been a really busy summer: my sister’s graduation in June, Italy in July (I’ll post some sketches soon, I promise!), family visits in NC, and this:
After 3+ years at Vicious Cycle, I am moving on. I’ve accepted an Animator position at Bethesda Softworks and will start this September! Between this and classes at Animation Mentor this fall, I hope to learn a lot and have fun…and of course track all my progress in this blog. 😉
I was accepted for the Fall 2009 term of Animation Mentor!!! I can’t wait to learn from some amazing animators and meet awesome people. I’ll need to brush up on my Maya this summer. 😀
On another note, I’ve updated my artblog under the hood, with a more modern WordPress theme and version. Comments now include Gravatars and threaded replies. (Thanks to my friend, Tina, who also has a brand spanking new webcomic out.)
Thanks for visiting!
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Crunch is finally over at the office, so I can return to learning and doing more personal animations. 😀
Above is a sketch done last week during a concert at a local music venue. I was a little heavy handed with the purple, something I will need to take into account next time I decide to watercolor my sketches at 4am.
Almost a year later, I finally post my work from Dead Head Fred. The animation section has a reel with some of the animations I did, and the Artwork: 3d section has a pic of some modeling/texture work.
The above picture is the box art from the Japanese version of our game. It’s 100x cooler than the U.S. released box art, imho. The Japanese website also has tons of extras like a chibi style comic strip and various wallpapers. It’s always neat to see how games are localized for different countries. You should check it out.
My website is fully operational. I ironed out most of the bugs. Any remaining ones are small visual nuances that you probably won’t notice (I hope.) I also got the RSS feed up and running again…unfortunately that involved me deleting my previous one with Feedburner and creating a new one. So if you were one of the 2 people that subscribed to my page, you’ll have to re-subscribe using my RSS feed link on this page. Sorry!
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As you can tell, I remade my site yet again. There’s a few bugs here and there I need to fix (i.e. my RSS feed not working and the extra space found beneath my artwork pages), but for the most part this is it. I restructured my site so it’ll be more organized and cleaner in design. For the tiled background, I used this awesome pattern from Din Pattern. If you’re ever looking for some background tiles, I highly recommend the site.
Above are some life drawings from last night’s session. I haven’t been to one in forever due to crunch. I used a Uniball Signo pen, after reading about it in Enrico Casarosa’s blog. I have to say, this has become my new favorite fine pen as well. The ink flows so smoothly you don’t want to lift your pen, hehe. It’ll be a fine addition to my travel sketching materials. 🙂
Unfortunately, next week we’re re-entering crunch so you may not see more life drawings until August. In the meantime, though, I will be posting other stuff *koff koff animation*. So thanks for visiting, and let me know if anything looks bizarre on your browser.
I upgraded my site to WordPress 2.5, and I’m really liking the UI overhaul for the admin. I haven’t tried out the gallery feature yet, but it seems really cool. I also fixed the problem with the Archives, so now, when you click on one of the categories or months, you will access all the posts from that category/month.
I didn’t want to make this another boring ‘Update’ post, so here’s some life drawings from a couple weeks ago. Decided to take a break from the brushpens and go back to using some pencils during my last life drawing session:
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The middle sketch, the model folded over her legs so her right foot was tucked between her torso and her right arm. It amazed me she was able to hold that pose. 😮
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The model, while posing, was reading one of the books from His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman, one of my most favorite book series. 😀