Leaving Animation Mentor for a while

Well... it has been a hard decision, but I will leave AM for a while to deal with all that moving to California implies. So many things are going on in my life right now that I can not put my 100% on the assignments so I decided it was best if I just concentrate now on my big change and then continue with my short film.

My new demo reel

I selected just what I think are my best animation clips, because as they say: a demo reel is as good as the worst of the clips.
The original is done on a DVD resolution so having a video in a smaller size is not a problem, but here looks too small.

Got hired by DreamWorks

Wooooooohhooooooooo!!!!!!!!!

Finished Class 4

I finished class 4 and this are the animations I worked on:

Class1-3 Progress Reel

Well, here is the My latest Progress Reel. It includes everything form class 1 to class 3 in reversed order. The last assignment "Line of dialog" is a work in progress because the facial animation will be done in class 4.

I hope you like it.
Thanks to all my mentors and fellow students for all the help!

Line of Dialog

I had been waiting for this assignment since the day I started Animation Mentor: Acting!!!!.
Well at last I was able to concentrate on making the character express emotion. Still with just a few face control, but acting never the less. acting was important on the previous assignment but I was still too distracted by the body mechanics.
As on the others I taped some video reference but this one have some interesting information I do want to share with you:

First of all, this animation thing can be addictive and if you are not careful you will gain wight, so first lesson, reserve time for exercise. I have gained about 20 pounds since I started AM.
Ok... I want you to pay attention to the text... the white one is what the character is saying, the black one is what the character might be thinking, what they call the subtext. The interesting thing about that is that one should not animate the words but the thoughts, the ideas. that helps a lot when making acting choices.
This is one of the first blocking:

I had to many similar hand gestures and some of them where a little bit cliche, so I decided with the help of my mentor to brake it up a little bit more.

When I went to spline I encounter my first gimble lock in Animation Mentor. It is definitively a not fun thing to have, but I managed to get around it.
Well, and with this I got to the end of class 3. :D

Pantomime

This one was a challenge. I had to try to recreate a scene and express contrasting emotions without facial expression, just pure body animation. I acted out the actions in front of the mirror and in front of the camera to use it as a reference and came up with this blocking:

I had a lot of fun animating the waiter which worked like magic from the beginning. but the other guy was a different story. I had to take in consideration that only one of my character should be doing something important at a time to make the silent dialog work, but I wanted the main guy to do so much stuff that the animation was getting to busy. at the end I had to delete a lot of the details I had him doing to make the animation more readable and believable. Moving holds was another thing that I had to learn how to achieve. Too still and you would perceive the character as rigid or dead, too much motion and it would not be a moving hold, to even motion on the holds and it would feel to CG. Moving hold can be tricky.

Heavy Object

This one was a lot of fun to do, and I was very pleased with the result. I focussed on contrast and reversing of the arcs. I still was trying to find the work flow that best fit my way o working so again I decided to try a different planning approach. This time I turned to this book:
"Simpified Drawing for Planning Animation" by Wayne Gilbert which is an excellent source of information (and inspiration) for this and use this style:


you might think is too simple, but it has all the information I need and can be done much quicker, and even then offers additional information about the forces involved in the action. Lets you experiment more and at the same time it will not hurt you to through away pages of exploring done in minutes.
This is the blocking:

This time I decided to use a different approach to take the blocking to spline. I decided instead on use the copy pair where you just duplicate some keys to hold the pose I was going to create more brakedown keys (keys that are not essential for the animation but help define the arcs and path of action). I think I hit gold with this one. It works just as well as the copy pairs but you are adding more information to your animation taking away controll from the computer. I felt like a kid on Christmas day when I wen from blocking to spline and the transition went perfect.
With this one I finished class 2. Yessss!