Wire Sculptures!

So I have a ton of older stuff to post on here, because I've been really bad about posting things closer to when they actually happen... Anyway, some wire sculptures!  I took a wire sculpture workshop with the lovely Don Hefner last November where he taught us a bunch of cool techniques for creating awesome things out of wire.  We made grasshoppers, snakes, dragonflies, and a bunch of other things.

Grasshoppers and dragonflies and bears, oh my!

I gave the bear to my dad for Christmas and made my mom and sister something as well.

A reindeer.

And a Hip Hop Gangsta Penguin.

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! 

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.