Sunday at noon, the first term was officially over. Term 2 began on Monday at noon. No rest for any of us. Thats ok cause I would probably go crazy if I had to wait. This term they didn't waste any time. We had an assignment due at the end of the first week. This, like many of my future assigments, is going to be a multiweek assigment. We are supposed to pick from a short list of actions and I chose "A character turning around 180 degrees." Its pretty general, so we are free to come up with our own ideas as to how Ballie is going to accomplish this. I started filming myself doing various things, but nothing really stuck out for me. I decided to do some cheesy dance steps. Below is the reference material that I ended up with. The moves are a bit too subdued, so I'm hoping to push the poses a bit to try and make it more lively. Also below are the thumbnails that I generated from the reference. I think they are too subdued as well, so I'll probably have to work on them some more. Anyway, enjoy.

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Well the term is over. It really has gone by so fast. I learned way more than I thought I would. It turns out that I really didn’t know the basics as well as I thought. I’m really excited about next term, Body Mechanics. I just found out today that my new mentor for next term is Victor Navone. He’s a really sweet animator at Pixar who’s worked there since Monster’s Inc. I watched his progress reels from each film on his website www.navone.org, and his stuff is amazing. I can’t wait to learn from him!

This week our assignment was to upload a progress reel of all of our work from Term 1. I didn’t have a chance to see everyone’s Term 1 work throughout the term, so this will give me a chance to catch up. I really wished I had time to go through everyone’s workspaces and watch their mentor critiques of their work. This would be chock full of great information, but there are just too many students and too many weeks worth of critiques.

The next term starts this Sunday, so there won’t be a break. I’ll have new stuff every week until Christmas. This next term will be a little different than this one. I will only be completing 3 shots compared to 8 shots this term. It will be more work though, because these shots will be way more intricate. We will get several weeks to complete each shot, so updates on my blog might be a little tedious as I show small improvements from each week. Hopefully someone will find it interesting to watch the shots progress.

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This week we took an in-depth look at the hips. This is an area that I have always had a hard time with and hopefully by the end of next term I’ll have a better understanding of it. I don’t know how to summarize what I learned this class as it was very visual. We went over a lot of reference video watching what the hips were doing during different movements. The take home message here was that almost all body movement starts in the hips.

The assignment this week was to take either our vanilla walk or our character walk and animate it in ¾ perspective. I chose my character walk because I wanted to work on it further to see if I could fix it. It turns out that I still couldn’t get it right, but here it is.

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Now that we have a vanilla walk under out belts, this week were supposed to plan out and animate a character walk of our choosing. The lecture this week focused on all types of different character walks. Its amazing how little changes can completely change the emotion and weight out a character.

Here is my attempt at a character walk. It’s a pimp limp type of walk and I had a hard time with it. As you can see from my reference, I’m still not getting it right. Hopefully I can get some good advice from Teach.

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Only three more weeks and my first term at AM is over! Yikes! This week we learned about exaggeration. It’s a principle that can really sell a shot or spice things up. The take home message here is that if you take video reference and then animate you character exactly like the reference, your animation is going to bore the crap out of people. You need to exaggerate the movement to put life into it. How much exaggeration to add depends on the shot. Cartoony animation is the extreme of that, but even the most realistic movement needs to be exaggerated.

The assignment this week was to take our blocked vanilla walks and fill in the rest of the frames. This is a long process of refining, refining, and more refining.

Here is my attempt at smoothing this puppy out.

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This week, we had to animate a character called "Ballie." He's basically a ball with legs. We were supposed to animate him doing a basic "vanilla" walk. This is a walk with no personality and even timing. This is a two parter, so for this week we only needed to get as far as blocking. Blocking is just your main poses and breakdowns without any animation. Next week, we will fill in what happens between the these poses, and then refine, refine, refine.

Anyway, if I have time I'll write more about this week later.

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