New Shots

I've been a Busy McBusy-son lately, animating up a storm.  As well as my Animals and Creatures 2 class (which I will try to remember to post about soon...) I've been working on some new dialogue tests.  One of my classmates from last term, who is a super awesome animation supervisor at Nerdcorps in Vancouver gave me some great advice about tailoring my demo reel to studios.  I asked him about applying to Nerdcorps which does a lot of work for television, and he suggested that I try animating 3 different dialogue pieces in 3 days-1 day for each shot.

I chose a fairly short clip for the first one, as it has been a while since I last animated a dialogue shot.  It turned out ok, I ended up spending a good portion of the day trying to figure out how the handcuffs were going to work though...

questions from Erica Miles on Vimeo.

For the second one I picked a longer clip, with two characters.  This one took me a bit longer because of the two characters, one of which being a dog (and a rig I had not used before as well).  This one could still use some work (and I haven't had a chance to upload it yet).

For my third shot I picked an audio clip that I've been wanting to animate for a while.  I think that this one turned out the best of the three.

Quarter from Erica Miles on Vimeo.

I've definitely noticed myself getting faster working on these shots and I'm going to work on a couple more over the next little while.

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.