Animation Mentor Class 5 part 3

Week 8

I did my first rough pass on the lip sync this week and I worked on pushing my poses.

Week 9

I started working on my second character!!!! I also continued to work on refining my first shot.

Week 10

More polishing and pushing the animation overall. I hid the card in his hand because I had to do some IK/FK witching on the one arm to get the gesture looking more intense and direct.  I also worked on the last shot.  My computer and maya had a fight though and I ended up losing a lot of work that I had done on the last shot right before I had to hand it in.  IT WAS LOVELY. 

Week 11

This was the last week that we had to work on our assignment for this term.  I had a lot of work to do...  I had to finish the last shot, add in a book shelf, re-constrain the card to his hand, fix up a lot of the third shot, and polish up everything so that it was nice a shiny.

I still have a lot of polishing to do overall, but that is what class 6-polishing and portfolio is for!  

Animation Mentor Class 5 part 2

For our second assignment of class 5 we got to work on a two person dialogue shot!  In week 4 we picked 3 possible audio clips and submitted them to get feedback on which one would be the best option to work on.  My computer decided to have a stroke or meltdown or something equally as wonderful this week and the audio on my computer completely quit working.  It made it quite difficult to start working on a dialogue assignment...  I had luckily picked out a bunch of possible clips way in advance, so I was able to get my assignment in on time.

We also had to do one facial expression pose.  I chose one of the lovely Zack Levi.

Week 5

My dad was luckily able to use his computer wizardry to get my computer somewhat up and running again.  (yay dad!)  We still had to completely wipe my hard drive and re-load everything back onto my computer.  I was really glad to have had my portable hard drive to back things up on!  The first half of my week was spent trying to get my computer close to being back to where it was, and then the rest was spent on my assignment.  I picked clip #2 out of the 3 clips and shot some reference of myself arguing with myself.  I think I won.

Then we did a rough layout pass to figure out what our shots would look like and where we would place the cameras.

Then I did some planning sketches.

Peter really liked my reference and planning stuff this week which was pretty cool!  

Week 6

We started blocking out our shots this week.

I stayed pretty close to my reference with my initial blocking pass, and the poses weren't terribly exciting.  I was still having computer problems this week, but I did my best to get at least a very basic blocking pass on all 4 of my shots so that I could show what my idea was for the whole scene.

We also had to do another face pose.

Week 7

In week 7 I just worked on the 1st shot and tried to get more motion in the body of the character so that he wouldn't look so stiff.

And another face pose!  Featuring the fantastic and amazing Angela Lansbury

I did this one as well, but decided to hand in the first one.

I'll post the rest of my work from class 5 very soon!

Animation Mentor Class 5 part 1

So I am about to finish class 5 (Advanced Acting) at AM, and I thought that I would update you on all that has happened over the term!  My mentor for class 5 was the fabulous Peter Kelly from ILM.  He has been there for quite some time and has worked on a number of awesome projects like Rango, Star Wars Episodes II and III, Iron Man, the upcoming Avengers movie and many more!  Peter was always great at pushing my work and being super supportive at the same time.  Out of all of my mentors so far he has probably had the most passion for animating or even just animation in general, which was really inspiring!  Plus he's a super nice guy!

Anyways, for our first assignment of the term we had to take our shot from class 4 and do the facial animation/lip sync on it!  We had to film some reference of our face as we said the line of dialogue, then write it out phonetically and to some planning sketches.

My planning sketches were a little rough and gross looking but they're just for planning...

Then we did our first pass on the face.

Then, in week 2 we had to use the bishop rig and pose it in two different facial expressions from photos.  

We also did our second pass on the face.  I worked a little more on the eyes and brows, as well as smoothing out the lip sync a bit more.

In week 3 we had another 2 face poses.

And our final-ish pass on the face.

I also tried customizing the Bishop 2.0 rig so that it wouldn't just be the plain ol' bishop.  It still needs some work, but that's what class 6 is for! 

Adventures in Groupon!

It has been a while since I last posted something on this blog of mine...but now I'm back!  I've had a crazy busy term at AM and I'll be posting my work from class 5 throughout this week.  But for now I have something else to show y'all!  Last year I purchased a Groupon for the website Picaboo to get a photo book done.  I decided to use it to put all of my art stuff from the last few years together into one place.  I used my special move of procrastination to put off working on the book while I was doing school assignments and such until early this year when I realized that the Groupon was about to expire, and I had about a week to put an entire book together...  It took a few late nights, but luckily the program that they give you to design the book was pretty simple and I was able to figure it out fairly quickly.  The upside to procrastinating for about a year is that I had a lot more to put into the book! The book is mostly things that I have posted here in the past, but it's really cool to have an actual physical collection of my work.  And here it is!

I wrote all of the little text blurbs really late at night while I was very over tired so they could probably be better, but the pictures are pretty!  

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then my book is worth a lot of words...

It's a fairly large book.

And is filled with many delights.

And is also delicious.

It's a DRAGON?!

So I promised to try posting things more often, and here's some stuff!  I made this little guy a few months ago.  He was my second 'felty' experiment (after the dog for my sister and before little Harry).  I wanted to make a dragon that looked a bit like the 'Terrible Terror' from How to Train Your Dragon.  I had found some wonderful scaly looking felt at Michaels and thought that it would work perfectly.  I did some quick sketches of how I wanted him to look and then tried to figure out some sort of a pattern off of those to cut the pieces out.  There was a lot of trial and error involved, but this is what the main 'body shell' (for lack of a better term...) ended up looking like.  I made sure to give him some lovely bulgy eyes and twisty looking horns as well!

You can really notice all of the nerdy things that I have in my closet in this picture...  Superman is gettin' his creep on.

The little white pins in his back were to mark where his wings were supposed to go.

I put a little armature inside of him so that he would stand up and I could put him in dragony poses.

Then he was given the power of flight.  One wing at a time.

And a lower jaw as well!  I left the end of the 'snout' open so that I could stuff the head once the neck was sowed onto the lower jaw.  I could push the fabric in a bit and it made it look like he had a hilarious little mouth.  I quite enjoyed it.

Here's more of the armature inside.  And look, he has little toes too!

Voila!  The finished Dragon! Also, my pitiful attempt to create a plain 'backdrop' with one of my sketchbooks....

Precious.

Class 4 Progress Reel

Happy 2012!!!  One of my resolutions this year is to post more often, so lets kick it off with this first one!  I got quite busy and didn't get a chance to post my class 4 progress reel from AM before the end of the year, but here it is now!

Dimos was an awesome mentor!  I think that his background in 2D really made it easier for me to understand things as he was explaining them.  He also made time to look at my updated work in the Q&A each week which was super helpful!  He's also a super cool and fun guy.  I feel like I learned and grew a lot this term!

Animation Mentor Class 4! Part 2

For our second assignment of Class 4 we got to do a single person lip dialogue shot!  We had to find a clip between 5 and 10 seconds long to work with for the next 6 weeks of the class.  We were only allowed to work on the physical movement of the body this term as the actual lip sync and facial animation is something that we get to tackle at the beginning of next term.  

I had to find 3 different audio clips to choose from, film video reference of myself acting them out and do some thumbnail drawings for each of them.  I had a hard time narrowing the clips down to 3, I started off with about 12 of them...

So I picked my 3 lines.

Did my video reference.

 And my thumbnail drawings for each clip.

Dimos helped me settle on clip 2, and we decided to cut off the end where he says "I don't want to go back to London."  Dimos also gave me the awesome idea to make the character homeless and standing in front of a cardboard box which would be his new home.  The shot would start out closer in and then move back to reveal the box house while he's saying "Residency Issue"

So I shot some new video reference with that idea in mind

And then I did my first blocking pass.

Getting the camera move to not look like garbage was a little difficult.

Then I did my blocking plus pass and added in some breakdowns.  I also moved the camera in tighter in the beginning and gave him some suitcases and a bucket to go with his box house.

We also had to do a hand pose that week portraying anger.

I kept getting weird bends in the fingers and had a little trouble with it.

Then I started refining and added in yet more breakdowns.  I also started adding in some up and down in the jaw movement.  Dimos got me to break up the arms a bit when he gestures to the box at the end so that they weren't quite so similar.

We also had to do a 'relaxed' hand pose.

The next week I did some more refining and took this baby to spline town!

And the hand pose of the week was 'surprised'.  It didn't turn out as well as I would have liked.

The final week we had to work on this shot (for this class) I did a bunch of polishing on the hands and tried to add a bit more movement into the upper body to make it less stiff.  I also tried to smooth out my arcs a bit.

Overall I'm pretty happy with how it's working so far.  I'm pretty excited to get into the facial animation next term and finish it off!  I'm even more excited that we get a 2 week break over Christmas though... I love my school and animating but it can get exhausting!