AM-Animals and Creatures 1 Week 3-6

Our post walk cycle assignment was to animate a type of quadruped locomotion be it walking. running, trotting, leaping etc.  I decided to do a smaller cat, because I thought it would be fun and the majority of the other shots being done were of bigger cats.

I watched a LOT of cat videos on youtube and found a bunch of this adorable little kitten.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYk07KFWPZ8 (the part that I referenced starts at about 2:08)

Then I did a bunch of thumbnails.

I wanted to tie in this shot and my third shot is a sort of anim-jam with the cat/kitten walking over and sniffing a sleeping ogre, then end up playing around the ogre and jumping on him-waking him up.

I blocked out the cat prancing/trotting over the ogre (which would be added later).  The tail was also hidden in this pass so that I could focus on the rest of the body.

I did a couple of more passes on it and ended up with this more refined version.  I also added in some tall grass to make the high steps the kitten is taking more believable.

AM-Animals and Creatures Pt2

Our first assignment actually animating, was a basic quadruped walk cycle.  Here are the thumbnail sketches.

And the walk cycle.  

It's still a bit 'hitchy', but I learned a lot from it!

AM-Animals and Creatures Master Class Pt1

I started taking the first of two animals and creatures master classes from Animation Mentor at the beginning of January.  I thought that it would be a good addition to my character animation skills, and although I wasn't sure at first if it would really be my cup of tea I've found that I actually enjoy it.  I've always loved animals, and learning about their anatomy, how they move and why they move the way they do is pretty cool!  My mentor for the term is John Nguyen.  He's a pretty awesome guy, and has worked for a number of impressive studios and on some pretty awesome projects/films.  He's currently working for Disney Interactive Media Group.

Our assignment for the first week was to do a bunch sketches of different types of animals to start honing our observational skills.  I made sure to include both a teacup pig and a unicorn in mine.

We then had to take the cat rig and do two dynamic poses with it.  It was my first time ever using a quadruped rig, and it definitely took some getting used to.  Looking at both poses now I can already see a bunch of thing that I would fix.

This last one looks more than a little drugged...

AM Graduation

So because I'm so good at posting things like a month after they've happened....here's a post about my AM graduation!!! :)

My family and I flew up to San Francisco on July 26th for an Animation Mentor filled weekend.  We headed over to The Cheesecake Factory inside of the Macy's in Union Square because there was an AM diner extravaganza meetup thingy happening that night.  I got to meet a bunch of the people that I have been going to school with for the past two years which was pretty awesome.  AND there was cheesecake involved, which made it even better!

The next day we had the open house at AM headquarters.  You could kind of see bits of it in the video news each week, but seeing it in person was fantastic!  They have a super cool work environment where everyone gets to personalize their own workspace.  There are castle cubicles, crazy lego models, cardboard cut-outs of Austin powers... We got to go on a tour and see all of the different departments.  They also had a mini 'Spike Carnival' set up where you could shoot targets with a nerf gun and win prizes.  Because I'm a stone cold killah I was able to knock a few of them down and win some candy and a lovely AM pin.  My sister is apparently a trained assassin because she was able to get the hardest one down and won me a t-shirt!  Way to go Paige!  They also had snacks for us and a photo booth which I unfortunately missed out on.  And I got to sign the alumni wall which was pretty cool!!!  We went to the Walt Disney Family Museum afterwards which was lovely!

Guess who's inside of Spike?

Sat the 27th was the day of the graduation!  I got to meet the rest of my graduating class and take part in an amazing graduation ceremony!  We also had an incredible commencement speaker...ANDREW STANTON!!!!  He gave a super inspiring speech and said that he could now call us animators.  In the words of Sophia Grace, it was 'SO GOOD'.  I got to walk across the stage and get my diploma from the 3 founders and I think that I surprised them with my 'creative accent'.  They seemed to enjoy it though. :)  There were also some student awards that went to some crazy talented and wonderful people and some great speeches from some of the mentors.  At the end of the ceremony they released a ton of balloons from the ceiling and it was really, really magical.

Post balloon bombing.

With Shaun Kelly!

With Bobby (Boom) Beck!

With Carlos Baena

I was pretty excited about Shaun signing my hat.

Who wears Mickey Mouse gloves to accept her diploma?  THIS GIRL.

Afterwards I got a chance to go and meet all 3 of the founders and take a picture with them.  And I got them and a bunch of my awesome classmates to sign my graduation hat.  My parents took my sister and I out for supper that night because she had also recently graduated from university.  We also went to the Disney store...and it had 2 WHOLE FLOORS.  It was a good day.  

Then on Sunday the 28th we had the AM BBQ which was open to both students and alumni as well as their families.  I got to meet and hang out with a bunch more awesome people.

The people at AM put on an amazing weekend for us and I'm incredibly grateful to them!! It was a fantastic (if slightly overwhelming :) ) weekend and it was great meeting my fellow classmates and finding out that they are actually real live people!  I'm looking forward to seeing a bunch of them again at CTN later this year!

Warning: The following post may be slightly mushy and/or sappy

I am officially now an alumni of Animation Mentor!

The past two years have been crazy. I have to admit that after my less than positive experience at my previous animation school my view of the animation community was slightly jaded, and I wasn't even sure if I wanted to continue in animation.  Thankfully AM showed me just how amazing and supportive the animation community can be!  My mentors and classmates constantly inspired me with their work and helped to push my work farther than even I thought it could go.  The whole AM community was so welcoming and supportive and I felt like I was a part of a special family from the moment I had 'stepped' on campus. I've learned so much in my time at AM from the lectures and critiques and from my fellow students work as well. 
  
I honestly can't say enough about AM and how much the past 2 years have meant to me.  I have to say a HUGE thank you to Bobby, Shawn and Carlos for creating the school in the first place as well as everyone working to make AM the wonderful place that it is!  Also a GINORMOUS thank you to my 6 fabulous mentors, Scott Lemmer, Pete Paquette, Rich Fournier, Dimos Vrysellas, Peter Kelly and Greg Whittaker and my Maya Springboard instructor Jared Garcia!  Without these wonderful and talented fellows I would most certainly not be where I am today!


Also a VERY LARGE shout out and thank you to all of my classmates and peer buddies!  Y'all were super supportive and took the time to give me some incredibly helpful feedback.  You also produced some beautiful work which inspired me to continue to push my work.  I hope to keep in touch and work with all of y'all some day!


If anyone reading this post is interested in getting into character animation I would 100% recommend Animation Mentor.  The people are amazing, it's crazy fun (although it is a lot of work) and there's nothing like learning from mentors who are currently working in the industry! They're not even paying me, people!


To sum it all up, the last 2 years have been incredibly challenging and a lot of work, but they've also been 2 of the best years of my life.  AM has said that they're in the business of making dreams come true and I definitely feel like I'm one step closer to mine.


THANKS FOR EVERYTHING!


-Love, Erica

Animation Mentor Class 6?!

Goodness, it has been a long time since I last posted!  I have been neglecting my blog terribly... :(  The past few month have been crazy, trying to keep up with AM while travelling and being sickly and just regular life stuff as well!  Seeing as how tomorrow is officially my last day as a character animation student at AM (which is super sad and exciting at the same time) I've got a whole lot of updating to do in a very short amount of time....Are you ready for it?  OK HERE WE GO.

Class 6 Week 1

My mentor for this term is the lovely Greg Whittaker!  He has worked as an animator at Dreamworks for quite some time and has worked on a lot of their great films!  He also worked with Chuck Jones prior to working at Dreamworks which is pretty freaking cool.  Greg warned us at the beginning of the term that the 12 weeks would fly by and that we should try to get as much done as possible.

Our assignment for the week was to submit all of our work so far so that Greg could help us narrow down what we might want to put in our demo reels.  He also gave us some feedback on where we should go with some of our shots.

Greg wanted me to quiet down the animation in my two person dialogue so that there wasn't an gesture on every accent in the dialogue and so that the audience would be able to focus on the characters face a bit more.  Also to help boost the intensity of the shot.  He also gave me some notes on animating the line of action in my anim-jam shots.

Week 2

This week I worked on addressing Greg's notes on the first shot my two person dialogue.  I really worked on keeping the character in just a few main poses.  

Week 3

I continued to work on refining and polishing the first shot in my 2 person dialogue.  I also started working on the second shot!

Week 4

More polishing on the 2 person shot this week.  I started working on refining the faces a lot as well.

Week 5

I worked a lot on trying to get the last shot working better this week as well as loosening up the animation of the female character in the 3rd shot.

Week 6

After working on the 2 person shot for what felt like a bajillion years I felt like I needed a bit of a break from it and decided to work on my pantomime shot this week.  I added a bit more to the background to help provide a bit more context for the scene and substituted in a modified bishop character for stewie.  I also tried to make the change in attitude from bored employee to interested in the customer employee read a little better.

Week 7

I replaced the girl stewie and the naked boss with new modified bishop characters this week and fixed the camera framing so that everything fit in it better.  I also worked on strengthening the change in attitude and on making the snap into position once he notices his boss behind him a little smoother.

Week 8

This week was kind of tough because I was out of town the weekend it was due and so I didn't get to work on it as much a I would have liked.  I also forgot to copy his visor file over to my laptop so he was without his hat this week.  Greg wasn't a fan of my very over the top, head whipping take so he suggested that I try to make the change in attitude even clearer and get a good straight in the pose where he really notices her.  I also worked on his face a bit and some very basic blocking of some movement for her.

Week 9

I wanted to get some feedback on my single character dialogue before the end of the term so that I would have some time to implement some of Greg's notes before the class was finished.  I worked on pushing the facial expressions a bit more and some overall polishing.  I also dressed bishop up and gave him a brick wall to talk in front of!  Hurray!

Week 10

Week 10 was a rough week for me.  I was out of town from the saturday night of week 9 until the monday night of week 11 so the only real time I had to work on my animation was a few hours sitting in various airports and a little bit of time at night in my hotel room.  I was able to get a little bit done, but not nearly as much as I would have liked to.  This week we were supposed to get our polishing done on our shots and compile them together with a title and end card for our demo reel.

We also had to do our dvd covers with a shot breakdown to put our demo reels in.  I really picked a great week to go out of town, huh?  Hahaha.

DVD cover

Disc cover and shot breakdown insert.

Week 11

I was actually home this week! Yay!  And boy did I have a lot of work ahead of me... I worked on polishing up all 3 of my shots and trying to cover all of the notes that I wasn't able to the week before.  

On the single character dialogue I worked on smoothing out the weight shift and his hand movement, as well as getting the upper and lower portions of the face to feel more connected.  

With the pantomime I worked on really differentiating the first bored pose with the suave pose when he's trying to impress her as Greg found them too similar.  I also worked on smoothing out his hands and added a bit more to the female character.

In the 2 person shot I focused a lot on making the upper and lower portions of the face work together better and getting some more squash and stretch in the expressions.  I also worked on pushing the anticipation for and the actual point at the bookshelf for the female character and the animation in the last shot overall.

Last week Greg said that he really like my dvd cover and that it looked very professional.  He just had a couple of notes regarding the spacing of the back cover and the design of the insert which I worked on fixing this week.

 

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! 

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!  

Animation Mentor Class 4! Part 1

So I've been pretty bad about keeping up with posting and such lately, but I'm going to try and get a bunch of stuff up here over the next couple of weeks!  First of all I started Class 4 (Intro to Acting) at AM!  The acting side of animation is a pretty big part of why I wanted to get into it in the first place so I was pretty excited to start this class!

My mentor this term is Dimos Vrysellas, which is pretty exciting for me because he started out as a 2D animator!  He worked at Dreamworks back when they were still doing traditionally animated films and got to work on Prince of Egypt, The Road to El Dorado, Spirit and Sinbad!  He worked on some 3d stuff there as well!  On a couple of the 2D features he got to work under James Baxter, so it's pretty cool to hear stories about that!  Dimos is not only a great animator, but a pretty cool guy as well!

For the first assignment of the term we got to do a short pantomime shot that showed 2 distinct and contrasting beats.  We were supposed to choose a scenario that fit our personality and spoke to us, so I decided to set mine in a fast food restaurant.  I wanted my character to go from confident and relaxed/lazy to Insecure/nervous/alert. I decided that in my scenario I would have my character leaning against the counter, start flirting with a customer and then panic when he notices that his boss is watching him.  I filmed some video reference and really got in touch with my cheesy side.  Although that never really seems to be a problem for me... :)

Apparently I'm a method actor and needed to put on an apron?  I decided against the 'Awooooga bagel eyes' (as I like to call them) and went with the cheesy finger gun off of the tip of the hat instead.  Dimos also suggested that I cut out the saunter up to the counter and just start it with the character leaning against it.  I was really glad that I took his advice, because it cut out a lot of work for me, and it wouldn't have added all that much extra to the shot anyways.

And now for some planning sketches!

I was also originally going to have a camera move to reveal the boss standing behind him, but Dimos told me that I could make it work without it.

Then I did my first blocking pass

I got some really good feedback on the first pass and for what seemed like the first time ever I didn't have to go back and completely re-block everything.  

And then there was the blocking plus pass.  I framed the camera in tighter and added a bunch of breakdowns.

The next week I started refining the animation and took it to spline town.

The last week that we had to work on this shot I did some polishing, but didn't get as much time as I would have liked to track all of my arcs and lovely things like that.  I still think that it turned out half decently though, and Dimos seemed to like it so that was pretty cool.