Animation Mentor - Class 2 - Week 1 & 2

So it's that time again ^^
New class ! New people ! New assignments !

These first two weeks have been a blast so far. I met my fellow classmates and they are all eager to be in the body mechanics class to up their game and learn a ton of new tricks ! Also my mentor, Rich, who I've now seen a couple of times already on the Q&A is a really awesome guy and also very inspiring ! You can tell he's ready as well to push us to that next level ^^

WEEK 1

For the first week we had to get used to one of the new rigs Animation Mentor has, and that's Stella. She's a lovely girl who wants to be animated like crazy ! So in order to get used to this new type of rig we had to make a couple of poses that suggested 'movement'. I went with these two and kept in mind some things like silhouette, line of action, negative spaces and appeal of the character.

WEEK 2

In our second week we built further upon our previous walkcycles and prepared for our first full body walkcycle. You could chose if you wanted to do a vanilla walk or a walk with character. I went with the second one and came up with a sassy/sexy walk where Stella is smoking from a Cruella De Vil typed cigaretteholder.

We had to plan this out, shoot reference and turn in our blocking. And in that order, here's what I turned in ;)

I focused on getting the mechanics right first, and I'm going to add the secondary action in there next week, after I got feedback on this ^^

Cheerios and thanks for reading !

Animation Mentor - Term 2 !!!

Tomorrow I start my new term, this time it's Body Mechanics Basics where we will focus more on creating believable physical movement with entire characters.

I'm really siked to start this new term, simply because this is a more challenging aspect of animation and because I'll be mentored by none other than Rich McKain, who worked on movies such as : Brave, Up, Toy Story 3, Horton and other awesome titles !!!

So expect to see some cool new updates pretty soon !

Cheerios ^^

Animation Mentor - Week 12 & Progess Reel

So right now I'm inbetween terms at Animation Mentor and we're having a 3 week break from classes to relax and to focus on things other than animation for a while !

Being an artist, you can put so much of your time into work and getting better that sometimes you forget all the rest that's going on in your life, so it's good to have some free time to spend with friends and families (especially during the holidays ! ^^).

WEEK 12

So... the last week we had to make a Progress Reel with all our assignments bundled together, so it's easy for ourselves and for our future mentor to see where you're at in terms of skills and knowledge. So without further ado here's mine ^^

I had a lot of fun this term, and although I already knew a lot about the principles of animation, I think it was great that I revisited them and focused on them individually on all these assignments ^^

I also met a lot of great people along the way and I want to thank my mentor Ray Chase for being an awesome guy and mentor ! We had a lot off laughs and I found it very interesting to talk in-depth about some of the shots you've done and movies you worked on ! I hope we meet again in the future ;) !

Cheerios and happy holidays everyone !

Comparison Reels

Found some cool comparison reels From Jason Martinsen and Jeff Gabor, very interesting to see how these guys go about shooting references for their shots ! Some of them are already older but it's nice to watch them again ^^


Epic Comparison Reel from jeff gabor on Vimeo.


Rio Comparison Reel from jeff gabor on Vimeo.


Horton Hears a Who Comparison Reel from jeff gabor on Vimeo.

B-b-babbedie !

Animation Mentor - Week 10 & 11

Hi boys and girls,

It's been a while again, but here's a "small" update on the last weeks of  Class 1 : Animation Basics

These last weeks we focused mostly on walks and we finished our vanilla walk and started working on a character walk. Which was more of a challenge and where I noticed (again) that you really can make or break your animation depending on the usage of the principles ! (more on this in week 11)

WEEK 10

This week's lecture was all about the walk, and how you can put more character in your walks etc...

Here's my revision of the vanilla walk. I fixed the issue with the feet but I still feel that there's something wrong in the forward translation of the body...something I'll focus on more if I have to do a walk again in the future.

Our pose this week had to convey 'exhaustion' so I went ahead and tried to pose out some stuff in front of the camera myself and found a pose that I was happy about. I ended up turning this in ^^

We also had to block out our PERSONALITY WALK .
I decided to go for a walk that wasn't a cycle, and went for a challenging drunk walk.

Because I started my blocking really late and didn't have that much time, I wanted to make it easier for myself and went ahead and shot some reference to facilitate the planning of my walk. This was fun to do and provided me with a good basis to start my animation from.
On the other side, I also ended up sticking too close to my reference which resulted in a not so entertaining performance (something I realised after whatching my first playblast).
But time wasn't on my side and I had to turn it in like this.

REFERENCE:
I added the white belt to accentuate my hip movement.

BLOCKING:
Also the fact that it's only from the side view makes it more difficult to see what's happening.
I wasn't happy with this so I decided to reblock this shot the next week.

WEEK 11

This week's lecture was about EXAGGERATION, and after seeing this I immediatly knew what was wrong with my animation ! It's was just not pushed enough and I stayed too close to the real motion that I lost all the entertainment value, so...

REBLOCK: 

...I decided to reblock my animation and I really tried to push my poses and ideas further !
Also the perspective view made it more readable.

SPLINING:

And then after some feedback from my peers I went straight into splining.
I'm pretty happy with it but there's still room for improvement, especially on the end jump and some of the hip movement inbetween the steps !

We also had to do our last pose, balance. 

And I decided to got with a more 'cliché' understanding of balance, but I'm happy with it.

Thanks for reading and cheerios !

Animation Mentor - Week 7 / 8 / 9

Hi guys,

Sorry it's taken a while since my last post, but I didn't really had much time to update this bad boy.
But now I do ! So here is a little recap of my previous weeks at AM !

WEEK 7

In this week we got a pretty in-depth lecture by Victor Navone about the graph editor and how you can use it to your advantage, how to keep your curves clean and what you should tackle first when you're going from blocking to spline.

In terms of assignments it was a pretty relaxing week for me because we only had to do our revision for the Tailor assignment, and since my mentor didn't really give me that much stuff to change, I didn't really had that much to do...so I only tweaked a little bit on my animation, but only on things that I still wanted to change myself. So without further ado here's the revision of my Tailor assignment (that probably looks kinda the same ^^)

WEEK 8

Oh man, this week it was all about WALKS, and to be more specific, about the VANILLA WALK.
What's that you say, vanilla ? Why not chocolate or strawberry ? Uh uh yeah offcourse, whatever floats your boat dude ! But with vanilla they mean just a plain old simple 'generic' walkcycle.

So we had to do a first blocking pass for our generic walkcycle, and this is what I turned in.

Then we also had to do a pose that would encapture 'physical strength'.

 WEEK 9

So here we continued the lesson on walks, and we took a more detailed look at the hips !
Basically, hips are very important, and everything derives from them, so make sure you have a good performance on the hips, and then the rest is easy peasy (actually it's still pretty hard, but it get's you half the way ^^)

For our assignment we had to continue to work on the walkcycle, this time going to spline and really try to nail it down !

Since I had a lot of trouble with the AM site not recognizing my previous assignments etc I couldn't get a critique on my blocking, so I just went with what I had the week before and just kept on animating. I'm not superhappy with it, there seems to be something off but I can't really tell what, so if you have some comments please do give them !

And again there was a pose to be done, this time it was 'concerned'.

Thanks for reading and cheerios !
I'll try to update more often from now ;)

Animation Mentor - Week 5 & 6

Hi y'alllll ! 

Since I didn't have that much time last week I decided to combine week 5 and 6 into one post.

So, for WEEK 5 we had a lecture on OVERLAPPING ACTION and what the different ways are to approach it and to incorporate this kind of action into your work.

In order to grasp this concept we had to go and animate a pendulum, with several 'apendages'.
I decided to put in a bouncing ball in there as well to get a more entertaining performance.

When I see it again, there's a lot of stuff that still has to be tweaked and can be better, but since the assignments are getting bigger and bigger I don't really have a lot of time now to go back to these shots. But I will do so eventually...so without further ado, the pendulum (already revisioned)!

 

Also we had to do a Stu pose for 'devastation' , and make sketches beforehand.

 

Then onwards to WEEK 6 !!!

Here we had a lecture about ANTICIPATION & SQUASH UND STRETCH

We learned why it's so important to set up (anticipate) your animation the right way so that your audience understands and follows what's happening on screen.

And to make sure we understand all the principles we've been learning about these past few weeks, we had to animate TAILOR. This is basically a bouncing ball with a tail that resembles a squirrely kinda creature...

I decided to go with some kind of 'obstacle course' where Tailor had to move through. I had a lot of fun on this assignment because I could try out something more fluid and it was just an awesome character to animate. 

And needless to say, there are still a lot of areas which can be improved, but I will wait for my critique before going back into this shot and applying them.

Cheers !!!
Feedback is highly appreciated ;)