Secrets - Part 03 (Dude! Where's My School?)

for best results, click picture, watch animation, repeat. 5 mb or so.

Hello all, strange week we are having, isn't it? It's a three day work/school week for me, blissfully, thankfully, mercifully due to Thanksgiving. That's enough to be thankful for right there. My cornicopia runneth over. Now buckle my shoes, you musket-toting freak.

I got some time in on the assignment this week, again not as much as normal, but since I've been doing alright on the productivity front, it's not such a worry as I would have thought. I got the mouth sync'ed up sort of. It has some chatter bits during the last line of dialogue. Oh how I miss my phoneme shapes! It made faking hiting every syllable so much easier. I think it was much more believable if you could really nail an "ooooooh" shape then you could muddle through the quick talking bits and no one gives you the microscope. But this muppet mouth business, well, it's harder than making the phonetic shapes. I will play with it some more next week to be sure. My arcs still suck, but they are better than ever. I'm still not on curvy-type splines. I'm doing the DaveB method of using only linear splines and making the curves by hand. I won't last till the end like this, I can assure you, but I'm pushing it and myself to see what happens when I take it to the Xtr3me. I just can't resist a bit of leet now and again. Ok, that has passed.

I owe my former mentor a cd. I told him I was going to send him a little something something and haven't yet. He probably hates me, dont' hate me Dougy. I have the cd burned, the cover printed, but no assembly yet. Where's China when you need it? I could use me some china.

AnimationMentor is down temporarily, something I never considered when signing up for an online school. In typical fashion, the support staff at AM are right on it, sending out emails and posting in the forums even before I have time to panic. They are very close to launching V2.0 of the website and school. Perhaps this was a player in the technical difficulties they are having over there. Anyhoo, the long and short of it is that school is going to be extended a week, fine by me. One more week to bang on this piece. That makes two, count 'em, two weeks to go before I need to have it finished. Cross my fingers and dot my eyes, I hope I can get it done.

Thanks for poking around. Now get lost, will ya?

Secrets - Part 02 (Eye Speak Reel Good)

click image for movie...about 5 mb.

Hey all. I'm happy again this week with how the animation is going. This week I had less time to spend than others, but I feel that it went pretty smoothly again this week and I made good use of the time I did have. Animating seems to be flowing out of me much easier than ever before. I feel like I'm in a good groove.

I started to work on more breakdowns and arcs for some of the transitions from pose to pose. I really tried to add some interest to the holds while keeping them from slipping into manic twitching. I like how most of it is working, save for the last set of three nods she does. I think the timing of those feel too evenly spaced and I hope I can give them a touch more character. I also got the shoulders more involved. I think shoulder animation adds a lot to a scene and perhaps next time I will put it a little earlier in my workflow than I did in with this piece.

I also really tried to focus heavily on the subtle eye and head movements to work better with the dialogue. In retrospect, I think that I stumbled a little bit with this on my last piece. So for this one, I really wanted to try to push it as far as I could without it looking forced.

I'm putting off the sync with the mouth movements as long as possible. I think they will be there for next week. Also I will continue to work on my arcs and transitions from pose to pose as well as making sure the hands play nice with the table top. I still think there are a couple of frames with intersections.

Please feel free to post comments with what you feel works and what doesn't. And thanks again for you interest.

Secrets - Part 01

Click on image to view, about 4mb.

I write you blurry eyed from lack of sleep. This was one of those weeks where I could sit down in front of the computer one day and seem to accomplish very little and other days I seemed to make good progress. So when I felt I was on a roll, I stuck with it as long as possible. I always feel it better to get as far along as possible for this second critique to have as much time making changes as possible.

Right now, all I can see are the bad arcs in all of her movement and it lacks some anticipation for some moves. But so far, I’m pretty happy with how the piece is coming along. That is to say, I think I like it, but I will have more of a clear vision of it tomorrow after I get some distance. I definitely feel that I need a short break from constantly being in the headspace of teenage girls and their dens of Machiavellian alliances.

Thats a wrap...for now

Click the picture to watch the animation. It's about 3mb.

So you all have something to look at, here is my assignment from part one of semester three of AM. It’s our first dialogue assignment with the intention to put the bulk of the acting onto the body of the character, rather than the face. In fact, the face isn’t really rigged to do anything more than move the brow up and down. The mouth can’t make any phoneme shapes, only open and close with a touch of side to side.

I chose this clip of audio because it seemed to present some good subtle acting possibilities instead of something that is pure over the top mayhem. It’s a small bit from a War of the Worlds storytime record that I have collecting dust on my shelf.

It’s rare that I’m actually pleased with something that I’ve done, so I’m going to try to sit back and enjoy this moment.

*update
Drat, that didn’t last long. Already I see things that I want to fix, little arc nudges and the like. Maybe during the holiday break...

The story so far....

Ok, so a little background about me. I found out I loved to draw in high school, I went to an arts college in the Midwest where I found out I wanted to be an animator. That was ten years ago. Soon after, I started pursuing animation with a passionate fervor. I went to a school that had a specific animation program called Columbia College in Chicago. From that experience I was able to get a clean-up and sometimes assistant animator job at Calabash animation where I worked a short time making Lucky Charms and Trix commercials and even a little bit on the movie "Space Jam."

Eventually I decided to move out to California. I completed an internship with Colossal Pictures. But my timing was all wrong. A few weeks after I finished training as an assistant animator, they laid off the bulk of their animation department, myself included.

After that, I got involved animating for CD-ROM educational products for kids. Production schedules were ALWAYS tight and the technology was always limiting, but the pay was great. More importantly, I really liked the freedom and creativity that it provided me in comparison with working for a big animation house. I was designing characters, doing storyboards, designing games, art directing, writing scripts, you name it. I got to wear a lot of hats and became proficient in just about every step of the art production side for these projects. I became incredibly proficient in Flash, After Effects, Director, Photoshop, Illustrator, you name it.

As the years went on, I animated less and less and art directed other artists more and more. Soon, I became restless right as 2d animation work was becoming scarce. I wanted to get back to my original love, animation, but I was fearful to leave my steady job. This is about the time that Monsters Inc. came out. Although I was very impressed with and fond of Toy Story, Monsters Inc. impressed upon me in a very profound way. Suddenly I could see myself getting away from my first love, drawing, and getting into 3d animation.

I really wanted to learn Maya as it appeared to me as the most artist friendly piece of 3d software I had seen to date. I think that was around Maya 3.0 when the "Bingo" marketing piece came out. Since then I dabbled in attempting to learn it, but the teaching materials were so poor (or my attention span too short) that I would soon give up every time.

I took some classes at San Francisco State, but soon after, I joined the graduate animation program at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. I took classes for about a year and a half there and was getting very frustrated. I was having trouble finding help in reaching that next level. It took me awhile, but eventually I came to conclusion that the program wasn't right for me.

So when I heard of this program, Animation Mentor, I thought, "Hey, why not?" I was looking primarily to learn about the pipeline and animation practices used in the big studios. I thought I knew how to animate and that I just needed help with the technical side. I couldn't have been more wrong! Being part AnimationMentor has served me the largest, tastiest slice of humble pie. I have learned more about animation in the past six months than I learned in the past six years of working. I realize just how much I don't know about animation and I'm completely excited about that fact. I love the structure of this school, but more importantly, I'm blown away by the level of enthusiasm, camaraderie and amazing animation that my fellow students are bringing to this program.

In an effort to be a part of and contribute more to the community, I decided that I will start this blog. Also, I will be starting a new website to showcase my latest work done at AnimationMentor. In my humble opinion, my new work makes my old stuff pale in comparison. I will be posting my past assignments soon and sharing with you my thoughts on my current work on a weekly basis.

So please stay tuned and thanks for your interest.

Ack! I've blogged myself.

If you look closely, you can see that my toes are bruised from all the kicking and the marks on the ground from all the dragging. And yet here I am. Somehow it has happened. Step 1, admission...

"Hello my name is Todd, and I'm a blogger."