Class 2 Progress Reel

So Class 2 is now finished and I learned so much!  Pete was an amazing mentor, and was never afraid to tell it like it is which I think helped me a lot and pushed my work further.  He also had hilarious Q&A's with much profanity and trying his best not to swear which kept me laughing all term.  I also have to thank all of my crazy awesome classmates for all of their support and helpful feedback on my assignments!  I definitely had my struggles this class but I have learned from them and overall I really enjoyed class 2!  Now here is my progress reel from the term!

Animation Mentor Class 2-week 7-11

For our final assignment of class 2 I picked the simple dance move option.  There were a bunch of different dance styles that I was thinking of doing, like Bollywood, 80's music video dancing, Michael Jackson, something from one of the Fred Astaire/Gene Kelly musicals or the Charleston.  I ended up looking at a bunch of 60's dances like the twist, fruging, the dance from Nancy Sinatra's 'These Boots Are Made For Walking' video (which closely resembles my mom's dance style) and then I remembered the dance from the beginning of the first Austin Powers movie.  It had just the right amount of fabulous 60's-ness that I was looking for as well as a fun audio track to go along with it.  Here's the clip that I used as reference.

The shot had to be 100-250 frames, so I had to pick the best parts of the dance and edit them together.

Here are my planning thumbnails for this shot.

And my first blocking pass.  This shot was already turning out much better than my drunken stumble...

The next week we did our blocking 'plus' pass.  Pete told me to push the up and down of the strut poses and the punching poses and to take out the last pose change because he felt like it was starting something up again right at the end.

Pete then told me to try taking out the pose at frame 170 because it was too similar to the ending pose and the ending pose was the stronger of the two.  He also wanted me to try to get the timing of the strut/punches to fit a little better with the music so I did another quick re-blocking pass before taking it to spline.

After I got Pete's notes for the re-block (he wanted me to add a 3rd punch and to bring the hand down into what I like to call the 'sassy position' but on the opposite side so that it would flow better into the next pose) I converted the stepped keys/breakdowns into spline mode.  I ran out of time at the end of the week and didn't get a chance to fix all of them before the deadline on Sunday.  This is what it looked like.

 

I was really unhappy with it so I worked on it for the rest of the day that Sunday and put it up in my public review area.  I knew that if I resubmitted it as my assignment I would be docked a full letter grade so I emailed Pete to ask his option on what I should do.  He had a look at both of them and said that it would definitely be worth resubmitting it regardless of the penalty because it was much farther along.  Here's what the re-submitted shot looked like.

The last week on this assignment was devoted to polishing our shots.  I was lucky enough to have Pete use my shot in a polishing demo during our Q&A so I got to see what kind of things he would to to make it beautiful.  He used a lot of hilarious Austin Powers type language while working on it which I really enjoyed.  The main things that he focused on in the polishing demo were knee pops, making sure that the body had enough oomph for certain accents and making sure that there was enough overlap on the head.  In fact I remember his exact words during the demo, "Don't be afraid to keyframe the living shit out of the head". Hahahahaha.

Here's how my polishing pass turned out

It still needs a bit of work, there are still some knee pops, certain parts could hit harder and the path of action on the head is a little crazy in parts, but overall I like how it turned out!  I'm really tired of hearing that music though, hahaha.

Animation Mentor Class 2-week 4-7

So I'm reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally far behind in posting my AM assignments so I'm going to try and get them all posted up by the end of this week!  I shall start with my second assignment of class 2, the Drunken Stumble.

The drunken stumble turned out to be way more difficult than I thought that it would be.  I did some video reference on myself pretending to stumble drunkenly around my backyard but my mentor Pete suggested that I find actual drunk reference so that my animation wouldn't feel fake or forced.  I won't post my video reference because no one really needs to see me pretending to be drunk, but here's the video that I ended up using for my actual reference.  Thank goodness for alcohol and hilarious relatives at weddings!

I then did some thumbnails of poses from the video reference (both mine and the other video combined).

The next week we had to block out our shot

My first pass of blocking was kind of all over the place so I tired to tone that down a little in my next pass.

We then had to move into the dreaded spline stage.  Where the evil spline creatures destroy any bit of timing that you may have had with your blocking.  It looked gross...

In the last week of the assignment we had to do a refining pass on it to make it look more like a drunken stumble and less like I was drunk while animating it.

 

It definitely turned out better, but I still need to work on the timing a LOT.  Right now it's still moving too fast. I do like the overlap in the head/upper part of body though.  It turned out better than I thought that it would.  This assignment was also done in the middle of my crazy radio contest so I probably didn't spend as much time on it as I probably should have...

Animation Mentor Class 2-week 2-4

Ok, so blogger finally decided that it wanted to let me upload video files again, so I can finally post what I`ve been doing for the past few weeks.  For week 2 we had to take our video reference and thumbnail poses and translate them into Maya to begin actually blocking out our assignment.  For the basic blocking we just had to get the basic timing, key poses and breakdowns in there.  Here`s what my first pass at it looks like. 

In week 3 we had to take our blocking pass and start a `blocking plus`pass.  We had to incorporate our mentors notes and start to move it out of stepped mode and into splined.  In Pete`s feedback he said that the wind up for the kick needed to have more of a bounce to it and more of a squash and stretch into the jump and kick.  I re-blocked it out incorporating those notes.

 

I started moving into the dreaded spline mode and this is how it turned out.

The timing turned out being really even and the kick was way too slow... I had a LOT of trouble trying to get Maya to do what I wanted this week and it was really frustrating.

In week 4 we had to take our mentors notes and start to refine our animation.  My biggest problem was timing, so I worked on it a lot.  Pete also suggested a slightly different approach to the fake out and wind up to the kick, so I took a shot at that.  I was still having trouble with Maya and it turned out looking a little choppy.  The speed of the kick worked out better though.

   

When I get time I might revisit it and try to make it smoother, but for now I`m just going to move on to my next assignment.  The drunken stumble! 

So I haven't posted a lot up here for a while, mostly because I have had a CRAZY busy couple of months, but I have a ton of stuff to post up here over the next while.  The first thing that I wanted to post about is that I started Class 2 (Psychology of Body Mechanics) at Animation Mentor!!!  My new mentor for this term is Pete Paquette, who like my last mentor works at Blusky Studios.  Some of the Q&A's that we've had with Pete so far have been the most entertaining that I've had since joining AM.  He doesn't sugarcoat things and he swears like a sailor, and I kind of love it.  He has also been doing walkthroughs in Maya during the Q&A's which have been really helpful.

For our first assignment we were given a pick list to choose from including things like walking down stairs, a sidestep, river dance, back flip, and other stuff like that.  I chose to do a roundhouse kick, because I was hoping that it wouldn't be too terribly difficult so that I could focus on making the weight of my character believable.  It turned out to be a lot more difficult than I had originally thought it would be...  For the first part of the assignment we either had to create our own video reference or go and find some on the internet.  Seeing as how the assignment was not to create an animation of someone failing a roundhouse or falling over I knew that filming my own reference would probably not be the most helpful route.  Luckily I found a couple of great roundhouse reference videos on youtube and this one especially was great in describing what was going on during the kick and showing it in slow motion as well.  I don't think that I have ever watched so many people being kicked in the head...There were many videos of people being on the wrong side of a roundhouse, and not just adults, little kids too....

The next step was to take the video reference and make thumbnails of the major poses to plan out our animation.