Week 4 down. This week we learned about good and bad timing. Its really cool that by just moving a few frames up or down the timeline you can really change the feeling of the animaiton. A heavy ball bouncing has totally different timing than a light ball.

Lets see, we also learned a bunch of definitions as well. Things like "velocity," momentum," and such. They want us all to speak the same language so we can better communicate our ideas to each other. It felt like I was reviewing for a physics class.

For the assignment, we were supposed to do an animation of two bouncing balls of different weights. Sounds pretty bland since we just did a bouncing ball animation last week, but surprisingly, it was a lot of fun! There was quite a spectrum of animations that the other students turned in. Some were pretty tame, and some were really ambitious. Overall, everyone did pretty well.

Doh! Its late! I'm off to bed. Here are my assignments for this session:

Posted by Danny Southard at 11:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I don't have a lot of time to talk about what happened this week, but I'll update this entry when I get a chance. I wanted to post my assignment and see if I can get a video to play in a post without the need for an external window.

Below are my sketches, pose and animation for this week:

Posted by Danny Southard at 11:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Week 2 down, many more fun filled weeks to go. This week our assigment was to go to a public place and sketch people in various poses and activities. After I had gone through the lecture and assignment videos, Sonia and I went down to the park in downtown San Mateo in the afternoon On a side note, the videos are super informative. The lectures vary in length from 30-60 minutes and they are taught by the founders of AM (Bobby Beck, Carlos Baena, or Shawn Kelly) (so far). They also include clips of other professional animators adding their thoughts to the topic at hand. Anyway, back to downtown San Mateo....man it was jumpin'! There were people of all ages playing soccer, volleyball, football, playing on the jungle gym, or just cooling out in the shade. I had a lot of material to work with, but it was still really difficult. I had a hard time capturing a pose on paper when everyone was constantly moving. Most of the time I would get about halfway through drawing the body and then they would move. For the life of me I couldn't remember what the rest of their bodies were doing before that. Even though I had problems, I still managed to get a few good poses in there. The next part of the assignment was to pick our favorite pose and, in Maya, pose "Stu" ( a character provided to us fully rigged by AM) like the sketch. It was pretty hard because my sketch wasn't very clear, so I wasn't sure what each limb was doing. That's something I need to work out more on paper before I go into Maya. Planning is key. Without planning you end up wasting time and your work looks a little crappy.

So after I was finished posing, I uploaded my pose to my assigment page for everyone to look at and critique. This is a huge part of AM. Everyone can post their work before its due to get some critiques or tips. Then you can go back and make changes before Sunday, at noon, when its due. Its so helpful to get some fresh eyes on something that you have been looking at for hours. Its also really interesting to see everyone else's work so far. Sometimes they are struggling with the same problems you are.

Anywho, in a few days, my mentor will look over my pose and give me a detailed video critique where he can draw on the image as he's talking. Its kind of like in a football game broadcast on TV when the commentators are drawing on the replay video. Its damn cool. I can't wait.

Here is my sketch and pose for this week.

Posted by Danny Southard at 11:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, I just finished my first week of AM. Even though our only assignment was to get acquainted with the site and our mentors, there was a crap load of information to go through. First there were a bunch of introductory and instructional videos to go through that explained the ins and outs of the AM site and Maya (the software program that most of us will be using to animate). Then there's the forum. Its huge! Despite the fact that not every thread applied to me, there were still a huge amount that did. These forums have been building up since the school started in March of '05, so there are so many discussions that went on about all manner of animation topics. While reading though some of the topics, I noticed that many of the questions had already been asked and answered in older threads. Inevitably, in each thread, an old-timer would reply with a link to an old thread with the exact same question. I guess that means when I have a question I'd better search the forums first.

After going through some of the forums I moved on to "Cruising the Campus" Basically everyone has a page with their personal info and all of their assignments that were submitted throughout the term. Since this was the first week, there wasn't much to look at, however, most of the old-timers had progress reels posted. These are basically demo reels with the student's work that they'd generated so far at AM. There were so many to go through, but they were really inspiring. There were students whose work just look amazing right out of the gate, and then there were students who frankly, sucked, but then over the span of a couple of terms they improved so much that their animation looked great. Of course some of the students were better than others, but it seemed that most everyone was at a point where they were making some pretty descent animation. Thats a great testament to how good this school is. I'm really excited to get started.

Posted by Danny Southard at 11:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

School finally started!!!!!!! Well, its mid-week in my first week at AM. There is so much information on the site! Its like a huge community of animators feeding off each other. I know I made the right decision. The only problem is whether I can keep up. Its going to be so much work! I had my first Q&A session with my mentor David Breaux. It was supposed to be only 1 hour long, Dave stuck around for another hour beyond that to answer any questions we had. Everyone seems pretty motivated to start animating, so its nice to be able to feed off the energy.

Anyway, I've got to get back to AM. So much to look through.

Posted by Danny Southard at 11:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)