Sketch Blog-Retro

"This is Bob Barker reminding you to help control the pet population..."

The theme for last week's sketch blog challenge was 'retro' and I can't think of many things more retro than the Price is Right.

Animation Mentor Class 1-week 7

I really enjoyed this weeks assignment because we actually got to give our character some, well, character!  We were given the choice to work with either the 'One Leg' rig or the 'Tailor' rig.  Our assignment was to either make the one leg character do a single jump or to make the tailor character do at least 3 jumps and we had to display all of the principles that we had learned so far.And as fun as a jumping ball with one leg sounds, I opted for the Tailor rig.  Tailor is really just a ball with a tail, but we were told to think of him as kind of a squirrel type character.  I tried to make it's bounces across the screen seem somewhat squirrel-like, and I tried to give it a bit of personality as well.

Unfortunately my modeling skills still leave a LOT to be desired and my 'acorn' turned out looking more like a really round spinning top...

I like how it turned out, but I'm still going to go back and revise it a bit when I get some time.

Animation Mentor Class 1-week 6

Overlapping Action was the focus of week 6.  Our assignment for the week was to animate a pendulum with 4 joints coming out of a stationary position and moving from one point to another.  We had to display a bunch of different aspects of overlapping action such as drag, follow through, successive breaking of joints and lead and follow.  Here's my assignment plan.  It was taken over by tiny red cowboys....

And this was my first pass of the assignment.

And I actually had time to do the revision for this week!

I'm not sure what the color changing box in the middle is or where it came from, but I'm pretty sure that it's a time portal.

Animation Mentor Class 1-week 5

I was pretty excited for this weeks assignment because we got to tackle one of my favorite principles of animation, Squash and Stretch!  Now while they may just sound like two of Casper the friendly ghost's uncles, Squash and Stretch can really bring a lot of life and energy to a character and keep them from being really stiff and lifeless.  We got to put this principle to the test with...The Obstacle Course.

AM gave us 3 different courses to work with, or we could create our own or alter them to suit our needs.  I chose course #3.  Here's my plan for the assignment.

I wanted to keep my assignment fairly simple this week so that I wouldn't get overwhelmed with AM, work and my Graphic Novel class as well.

It definitely still needs some tweaking, but this is what it looked like when I handed it in.

We also had a Stu pose assignment for this week, and the emotion that we had to portray was Devastation.

It was kind of hard to come up with non-cliche poses for this week, but I did the best that I could!  Here are my thumbnails.

I ended up picking #12 for my final pose and this is how it turned out.

Animation Mentor Class 1-week 4

Our lecture for this week was about timing and spacing and how both can affect the feeling of weight that something has.  For our assignment we had to take a heavy ball and a light ball and portray the differences in weight through the use of timing and spacing.  We first had to plan out our assignment.

I chose to do a bowling ball and a ping pong ball.

We were also encouraged to go out and find video reference for our animation and our substitute mentor this week Paul Allen sent us a bunch of really great video files. This is one that I used quite heavily as reference for mine.

My ping pong ball unfortunately turned out looking more like a super bouncy ball, but oh well.

I haven't had a chance to go back and revise it yet, but I may get rid of the crazy back-spin on the ping pong ball because I'm not sure of how well it's reading.

Animation Mentor Class 1-week 3

This is the week where we were first able to dive into the world of animation!  With the ever exciting bouncing ball assignment.

 First we had to sketch out some thumbnails to show our thought process.

Then we had to make it bounce in Maya.  We weren't supposed to use any squash and stretch as that was going to be covered in a future lecture.

We also had to sketch out various poses that expressed 'excitement' and then pose the Stu character into one of them.

Here are my thumbnail sketches

And here is my Stu pose.  

After I got my e-critique back from my mentor Scott, I went back into the assignments and made some revisions.

Here's my Stu revision.  Scott wanted me to straighten out the one leg more to help with the line of action and to push the feet farther apart to give it more of a sense of dimension. I also tried to make the curve of the spine a little stronger and offset the angle of the shoulders from the hips a little more. 

And here's my bouncing ball revision (it also has the Stu pose revision at the end)

I gave the ball a ground plane so that it didn't look like it was bouncing off of an invisible force field (which it totally was in the first version by the way!) And I worked on making the arcs better and more arc-ier.

Animation Mentor Class 1- Week 2

So it's been a while since I last posted something so I decided to let y'all know what I've been up to at my wonderful school Animation Mentor!  I started Class 1 at the beginning of January and got my first mentor Scott Lemmer!  Scott is an awesome guy who has worked for a bunch of studios like DNA Productions, Pixar, Disney and Blue Sky!  He's also originally from Canada which is pretty cool!  I also have a bunch of awesome and talented people in my class from all over the world!

Anyways, our first assignment was to go out into the world and sketch people.  We then had to pick one pose out of our sketches and pose the Stu character with it in mind.  These are my sketches.

The pose that I picked was originally of a guy waiting at the counter of a bank.  The Stu pose ended up looking more like a guy waiting for a drink at the counter of a bar.  He also ended up looking a lot swankier than I originally intended...