Class 4: Introduction to Acting

I can't believe I already half way into my animation program!!! This has been an amazing experience and it just gets better and better!!

This class is not about how to move a character. I know the principles and how to apply them into the actions of the character. Now is time to give a real life, story, background, personality to the character. This will be done in two assignments: a pantomime and lip sync projects over 12 weeks.

This term my mentor is Erik Morgansen. He's been working in animation for 13 years. Most recently he worked at Disney on Meet the Robinsons, and from that point until now at ILM on such films as the Transformers movies, Star Trek, Avatar, and Rango.  Amazing!! Isn't he??

 So, bring it on Fall 2012!!

How can I become an animator?

You have to be born with a sinister sociopathic disease that makes spending a long period alone in a dark room, moving stuff very very slowly or drawing the same thing hundreds and hundreds of times seem to you not only like an excellent career choice, but like an absolute necessity to your very being, a valuable use of your time and of great importance to humanity. If these symptoms sound familiar then you are already an animator. If you are not already an animator you will come to realise this for yourself within hours of giving it a try. Becoming a director or film producer is something you can learn and achieve. Animators are just born that way.

(Taken from DYFP website)

Reel Class 3

This is my latest demo reel, it includes my work as a student of the Advanced Body Mechanics, Psychology of Body Mechanics & Basic Foundations classes at AM.

Climbing over a wall

Hey! I realized that I am such a bad blogger, since my last entry was well over two months ago!! On my defense I can say that last term was mental!! First my in-laws payed us a two weeks visit, then the Olympic fever spread all over the UK and the world, and last but not least, the summer arrived in the UK. It was so difficult to focus on work while it was sunny outside... I'm actually surprised that I survived the term!

Besides all the distractions I think I managed to do a good job. Mostly thanks to my mentor Mike, who gave me great advice as to how to tackle the animations. I'm going to illustrate his advice with my last animation of the term.

Climbing over a wall

• Reference & sketches
  Since I'm no the the athletic kind of person, I decided to go on-line and find a reference video for my animation. I used the following obstacle course video (14:00 to 20:00). Then, I started my sketches. Without having to go into too much details, I drew the line of action of the character, as well as the orientation of the hips and shoulders. That will be incredible helpful in the following steps.

• Blocking
  At this stage, I moved from the pen and paper to the computer. The idea is to recreate the poses that I drew with the character. The poses were supposed to be super exaggerated, cause it's so much easier to tune it down a bit that to keep pushing fwd a pose over time. Also, it's ideal to only have between 8 - 12 poses, and the way you select them is by recreating just story telling movements.

•  Blocking Plus
  At this stage the in-betweens keys are added, before doing it so it's super important to have the previous poses checked. They must be super clear, otherwise the in-between keys will be using a weak pose for reference. A good tool to use while doing the in-betweens is a plugged called tween machine  which, takes two keys and generates a new one in between the two of them. Although it's very helpful, it also doesn't know anything about arcs, so make sure you are checking them every time you use it. At this stage, timing is incorporated.

• Refining
  At this stage things, like anticipation, breakdowns, arcs and overall timing and spacing is incorporated into the animation. It's a good idea to keep the animation on linear even at this stage. As it is possible to make small or big changes without risking overlapping of the keys.
• Final
  The keys are changed from linear to tangent and if all the previous steps were done properly it shouldn't take long to fix little details on the graph editor.

You can see all this stages of animation on the following video.

AMers UK

As I have told you AM is a unique experience; not only because the program is very well structured, or the mentors are super talented, but because of the community.
During the last months I have met people from all over the world with the same love and passion for animation that I have. We write on each others workspaces and we comment on our work.
Well last week I had the opportunity of meeting a large group of AMers that live in the UK. We met at a pub in London and shared our experiences in life that lead us to sign up to AM. We joked and laugh, and made new friends. It was really weird to see some of them for the first time in person, but I really enjoyed it!

Class 3: Advanced Body Mechanics (Summer 2012)

I'm now in class 3. I can't believe time is passing by so fast! I still can remember my first assignment in Animation Mentor and how it though people on class 3 were absolute animation genius! So, it's now my turn to inspire people in class 1, but first let me tell you what class 3 is about.

With 118hrs of instruction this class will develop a fuller understanding of fundamental animation principles and more advanced elements of body mechanics. I’ll continue with the same bipedal character from the previous animation class and tackle a sequence of shots. AM website

My tutor for this class is Mike Gasaway, an Emmy award winning Director with over 6 years of directing/producing experience, specializing in computer animation and the coolest guy ever!

All I can say is that I am loving every step of this journey, and I'm thankful for the opportunity of learning from these talented people!

Taking a break and helping animals

Between class 2 and 3 I got a whole week of holiday!! Which was pretty awesome for like a day. On the second day I was super bored, but then I realized that I still had one project that I needed to work on.

I had been a volunteer for RSPCA Cambridge and District branch since last January, and I took on the responsibility of designing a new website for the branch. The current site is a bit of an eye sore (in my opinion), full of info, links and random stuff that is not very user friendly. 
Don't believe me? take a lot at it!

So, with the help of other people at RSPCA, I designed a new website.

Unfortunately, it is not live yet... but hopefully it will get approved soon and you guys can visit and test it.

In the mean time, here is the link to the site. Even if its not my design you guy can still read about all that RSPCA Cambridge and District branch are doing in the region and you might be interested in helping. Perhaps, you can fall in love with one of the cute animals that need to be re-homed. Either way, please stop by the site and support your local RSPCA.

www.rspca-cambridge.org.uk

End of Term 2 (Spring 2012)

Heck yeah!! I did it! I finished my second term at animation mentor and I'm thrilled about it!! I only had three assignments, but they were hard! This term, I particularly enjoyed having to go outside and shoot myself for reference. It give me a different perspective on how the body has to move when I was animating it. I also enjoyed getting feedback from my peers at AM, which helped me to improve from pass to pass. Also, according to my mentor, Dana Boadway, I improved a lot from my first to the last assignment. Her comment made me very happy :)
So here it is my reel including all my animations of this and last term. What's your verdict? Have I improved a little?  a lot? 

 

Climbing

For my third assignment I decided to animate Stu climbing! I went to the park and shot some reference of myself... Let me tell you something, it's harder than it looks!!
So, here's the video starting from the final animation, then the passes and finally reference. Enjoy!

High Jump

The Olympics are everywhere so with that as inspiration I animated Stewie (without arms) running and doing a high jump. The video includes me running, an athlete actually doing the  high jump (cause I was not even going to try it!), and the animation passes from blocking to final. Hope you like it!

Slide to the left...

This term I had been quite busy animating, which means that I have had no time for reporting updates on the program, but finally here I am!

During this class, the assignments are due in 4 weeks... first I though it was way too much time to do a 100 frames animation, but now I know it's not at all!

I selected to animate a side step, and the first step was to record myself doing it. It is vital that you shot as much as you can of the footage that you need. That way you can feel the way your body is moving and apply it to the character.

Then you block the animation, which basically is putting down all the key poses and breakdown poses. Once the poses are established, you can start adjusting the timing. The weight, and the movements have to be easy to read.

The next step is working on posing passes. I this step you will be changing from stepped keys on Maya to splines. Which means the movement will flow from pose to pose. Don't forget to add all your pauses, otherwise the character will be floating around. Also, lock the feet before the body.

Finally, solve all the knee pops that could appear, and keep cleaning the animation until all the poses are interesting, and your timing feels right. Don't be afraid to ask for feedback on each stage.

So here is a video with all the stages of my animation. Enjoy!

Class 2 - Spring 2012

So, I did it! I passed my first term at Animation Mentor and I feel epic!!! ha ha But now, it's not time to sit on my laurels! I only had one weekend to catch up on my sleep and now I am already half way into the first week of the 2nd term: Psychology of Body Mechanics.

Let's get ready to:

• Learn the core concepts of body mechanics
• Create physical performances that are believable
• Recognize the most common pitfalls in animation and practice nimble recovery from them

In no less than 118 hours of instruction! Tomorrow, I have my first Q&A session with my tutor Dana Boadway, I am exited to meet her and hear more about her work. She has been working in the animation industry for over 10 years!

End of Term 1 (Winter 2012)

I have reached the end of my first term at Animation Mentor. I has been a terrific experience, I just love it! I have learned so much, I have grown as an artist and animator.

I have learned how to take critiques from other people and to follow my mentors directions. I really feel 12 steps closer to my goal and I'm determined to enjoy every bit of the journey!

This is my basic reel for this term, I still have to put some music to it, but in the mean time Enjoy!

Personality Walk

w10 -11 Personality Walk

A walk can define a character. It is affected by the character's proportions, size, personality, mood, attitude, etc.
I chose a female catwalk walk for this assignment. I am quite girly and I wanted to show something about me on my assignment. So I put on some killer heels to Ballie and gave some sexy swings to her hips.
The rotation on her hips a a lot more pronounced that a male walk, because the heels put extra pressure into the lower back, knees and feet. The position on the feet as she moves forward have to be aligned to keep her balance. Finally there's an extreme stretch on the leg and it moves forward.
It is quite difficult just with words, so here are my drawings visual aids.

 Sketches

Blocking

Final Personality walk (perspective, side and front view)

I also worked on some poses with STU, using my personal experiences as inspiration!

Exhausted: the word to describe the way I felt everyday after work... and couldn't help falling sleep on the subway.

Balance: I was a cheerleader for a couple of years, and although I never mastered an "scorpion stunt", I was always amazed by it!

Vanilla Walk

W8-9

Vanilla walks is the term used by animators to describe an normal everyday walk. It is probably one of the most difficult things to animate, mostly because we all are experts on walks. We might not know the names of the poses and keys needed to recreate an animated walk, but we all can tell when something is not looking quite right.

A walk cycle takes approximately 24 frames = 1 second to  complete a loop and  can be broken into 3 different parts:

Contact: is when both feet are touching the ground, usually this happens on frames 0, 12 and 24 which is when the loop starts again.

Extreme down and up: the highest and lowest position of the walk (Down: frames 3 and 15; Up frames 9 and 21)

Breakdown: the passing position (frames 6 and 18)

The easiest way to create a vanilla walk is by having a good storyboard in which your timing and movements of your character are defined. When animating, use a pose to pose technique, and later move on to a full animation. Here are my stages of the vanilla walk.

Storyboard:

Blocking (pose to pose)

Full vanilla walk

Finally, as part of these 2 weeks assignments I created two poses with Stu that represent different emotions. Any ideas of what they might be?

 

Walk-through: Spline Editing

Week 7

For this week I had to animate a one-leg character, using all the principles I have learn so far.

First I had to create some reference of the jump. So here it's a very long video of me... jumping!

Then I worked on my storyboard:

After many hrs of preparation, here's my animation!

Overlapping Action

This kind of action makes the animation feel less robotic and more alive. It breaks up the parts of the character and moves them at different times. Pretty much everything in nature moves this way.
This is my assignment of a side-view animation of a pendulum starting from a stopped position, then coming to a rest with overlapping action on the pendulum. Enjoy!

Obstacles Course

For week 5, I had to animate a ball bouncing through an obstacles course.  Here it is for your entertainment.

Desvastation

devastation

Pronunciation: /ˌdɛvəˈsteɪʃn/

noun

[mass noun]

1great destruction or damage: the floods caused widespread devastation

2severe and overwhelming shock or grief: she spoke of her devastation at his death

Oxford Dictionaries 

I have never paid much attention to the world devastation until last week, when as part of my assignment I had to draw and recreate a pose that portrayed a sense of devastation.

My first thought was to Google search for a "devastated" image. I was a little bit shock to see that the word had been wrongly used by the media in so many occasions. I found large numbers of images of celebrities with the captions like "Devastated by divorce after a two weeks marriage". 


Obviously I was on the wrong path to find some devastating images, and then it clicked! I had to search for the names of the events that devastated entire cities in order to find what I was looking for. Am I the only one that thinks that this is ridiculous? I really don't think the Kardashian divorce is devastating, in the same way as the Tsunami in Japan or the Earthquake in Haiti. 

I believe the media should choose properly the words they use when reporting something. So they don't undermine the meaning of the words. Words can be powerful, but only when they are used correctly.

With my rant out of the way, here are my drawings and final pose of a devastated person.

 

Bday cake!

Last week was my bday and I got a "decorate-it-yourself" cake. I loved it! I even dedicated a space to the bouncing ball! Check it out!

Balls, balls, bouncing balls!

I'm already on week 5 of the program so I will have to be very short about what has happened so far.

Week 1: It was all easy... watch the welcome video, set up your account and make sure you don't miss the Q&A at your assigned time ( my case Tuesdays 8pm) Easy peasy!

Week 2: Go out and draw people on the streets. (seriously??? It's freezing out there!! I just drew from pictures :P) Then choose your favorite drawing and using the popular 3d character called Stu recreate the pose. 

Easy peasy!! ... not really! I spent little time on it and it reflected on my grade! :-o Be for sure that it was a wake up call! This is not going to be like GSA! (I'll tell you about that horrible time of my life someday). So here it is, my not so good pose of Stu.

Week 3: Animate a bouncing ball with the weight and bounce of a basketball. 

This time I did spent a lot of time looking a bouncing balls. I even took out my calculator and applied some physics when I was animating. It went well, but I had to make some changes the following week, cause animation is not just physics. You have to feel the movement. This is the revised version of it.

 

Week 4: Animate both a light ball and a heavy ball that bounce then come to a stop in the same shot. 

I loved this project! It was incredible difficult!! I spent so much time watching at balls! Light ball, heavy balls, little balls, big balls... It paid off!! My grade improved on this last assignment!! So, now for your entertainment I present to you my bouncing balls! :-)

Typing again

Hey there! This is Claü and I had been encouraged to start a blog where I can update about my latest animation projects.

So here I am, back to the keyboard and the words... away from the virtual brushes and 3d environments. 

As you guessed I am an animator! I am an artist! I am currently studying Basic Foundations on animation at AnimationMentor.com, this is my 5th week on the program. I am excited to tell you all about it and how it will help me get closer to the job of my dreams!