Well, the break is over and AM is back in full swing. It was a nice relaxing break and I enjoyed every minute of it, but I was dying to get back to animating. I found myself visiting the AM thread at CGtalk several times daily to find out all the latest info. It felt like it was my first term and I couldn't wait to get started. Anyway, now I'm in and starting my third term: Intro to Acting. This is what a lot of us have been waiting for. Now we have a chance to showoff or discover our acting skills. I'm a little nervous because I'm not sure if can act. I really wish I had taken an acting class at some point during high school or college, but I was just plain chicken. Ya know, thats what they say.....animators are just actors who are too chicken to get on stage.

My mentor this time around is Keith Sintay. He's been in the business since The Lion King! Wow! Its going to be a blast learning from him.

The lecture this week covered various topics in acting for animation. It's an epic lecture so it took me a while to get through it. Overall it was really informative. If it's any indications of the types of lectures this term, I'm going to learn a ton in these next 12 weeks. I'm really excited.

We started this term running as we got our first assignment on day one. The object of this assignment is to create a scene with one character with two beats. This essentially means that the character must go through one emotion change. We have 120-250 frames to do so and on this assignment they are stressing the importance of staying within the time limit. Previously they were a bit lenient and some of the assignments ballooned to twice the frame limit. This sort of thing wouldn't be allowed in a studio because they aren't going to change the film just to accommodate your epic shot.

For my shot, I chose to keep it simple. I wanted to try to animate a more serious shot with this assignment as well. I chose to animate a down-and-out character begging for money. While it may turn out to be funny anyway, I chose to exaggerate some of the movements to try and lighten the mood. Anyway, we'll see how is comes out. Here is my video reference and thumbnail pages. Next week, blocking.