Like sands through the hour glass...

Hello,

It is with a soggy eye that I am forced to part with my trusted mentor of three months as we reached the end of the Advanced Acting class. Jason was a great great mentor to whom I will always carry around a little golden nugget of debt to for being a part of my journey to wherever. That guy is super fun, laid back, friendly and I'd love someday to buy him some beers somewhere. So again, I have to cut the cord and move on. However, it’s hard not to be excited about what lies ahead. So I tarry not, on to the newses.

My final departing criticism from Jason Schleifer was mostly positive, with the note that I should work a bit on my confidence and not be afraid to let the character settle a bit. Well, valid points all around, I know. My confidence seems to wane and wax all the time. I seem to get something done in a shot that I’m happy with, but the next week, it can all seem to fall apart. The quality of my animation is my looking glass to my ability to do this, seemingly at every step along the way. And I know, that I have a very harsh eye when it comes to my stuff. I think the point that Jason made was a good one. I have to believe more in my ability to do this, even on the bad days. The bad days are just that, and I will come back at it and get something that I’m happy with at the end.

Well, that is something that I have to work on. I hope it will come with time as I get myself out of more and more animation jams. This last project was a toughy for the soul but I pulled it out of my shame pile and put in on my needs slight tweaking pile.

As far as letting the character stay still, I knew it all along in the back of my mind. Now I just have to execute. It’s hard for a bit of a show off like me not to pack every second I get on the screen with a new gag or a new attention getting bit. But I will make sure to not over do my animation from here moving forward.






So onto my new mentor…Gavin Moran! Gavin is one of the favored mentors at AM as well. An Irish fellow relocated here to California, he’s worked on films at Disney, Wild Brain and now at Sony Pictures. He’s known for giving you a no-nonsense good swift kick to the hole approach to his mentoring. I can’t wait.

We are tasked to come up with three short film ideas and casually present them to our mentors for this week. Well, technically next week, as I’m in “group two.” So I get to watch group one-ers squirm first. Honestly, I can’t help but feel a tinkle of schadenfreude glee about not having to go first.

Visit again now, ya’ hear?

Updog - Part 08 (Smells Like Teen Updog)

Well, well. Guess who isn’t ashamed of his piece anymore!

That’s right. It’s me! How’d you guess? You’re so good at this game.

It was another three-day work week so I could jam on my piece for another set of three and a half marathon days. This time it was a completely different story. Everything was clicking, Batman. I was getting my arcs shaped up. BAM! I was getting much better weight on things, POW! And I resolved all of the little timing problems, CRUNCHHHH! Things just went smooth as all get out and thank the cartoon gods for that as I had a TON of work left to do.

There isn’t a single piece of this that didn’t get a major reworking, save for the shoulder slap. I reworked the weight and timing of Beige’s entire beginning part. Reworked the leap over a bit as well. Fixed some of the stepping towards the end. The hands, the arcs, it was all flying together like gangbusters.

All of that amounted to a huge shot in the arm of Vitamin Confidence and by the end of the week, I was grinning ear to ear again as I worked. So my faith was shaken, rattled, tested even, but not completely blasted out of existence with my ability to animate. I’ll figure this stuff out yet. I know I will.
So it’s almost done, but not quite. I still haven’t tracked all of my arcs yet or shaped my eyelids yet. There are also a few ins and outs that need tweaking. But all and all, I’m liking it again. Perhaps if I feel bold, I will give each of them a tie to show what little professionals they’re supposed to be. And give them a proper office. And render it. Ok ok! Lay off me, will ‘ya?

Updog - Part 07 (Tuna Fish Meltdown)

There is no joy in toddville.

Taking two days off work this week, I slogged it out on this piece for three days straight. And I’m talking about three good 14 hour days with my but in my chair and no distractions. Things did not go well and, as it stands, I hate it.

An innocent little comment from my mentor Jason about having Beige really pop up at “Up” and down at “Dog” dissolved a day of that time. He had a concern about a double dip when coffee pot was set down and before he popped up in the arc to shift his weight onto his hand (about frame 80.) I didn’t necessarily agree with him that it was an issue. But I figure it’s good to practice incorporating feedback that you aren’t 100% on board with, because I’m sure that is a weekly (if not a daily) occurrence at the big picture houses. This week, I tried to incorporate it.

Unfortunately, my keys were no longer neatly aligned on the same frames. There were a lot of offset keys in the spine and neck and head and arms and all of that. So changing it proved to be hugely difficult. It seemed such a small thing at first glance, but it wound up kicking me in the butt and then the shin and then laughing at my haircut.

I got it to this point, but there is still a bump when he sets down the pot and the weight isn’t working for me at all. The “or” line got rushed to make time for the new physics of the thing. And there is a strange floating settle after he lands that I didn’t have time to remove.

Basically, it felt like everything I touched this week turned to poo. My confidence is completely shot. I’m consumed with thoughts like, “well maybe my last shot turning out half way decent was just a fluke. Maybe I don’t really know what I’m doing at all.” But then try to slap that part of me in the face and yell at me to snap out of it. And then the other side slaps the other part and screeches about how he can't get it like he wants it no matter how much snapping he does. Then a big sissy fight erupts in my brain. Much imaginary hair is pulled. Many mental vases are thrown to the floor. And then a lot of fetal ball crying by everyone involved.

Ahem. Focus on the positive.

I put in a ton of time as well on the body mechanics at the end with Greeny taking small side steps and Beige pulling away. It’s sorta-kinda working.

As it stands, I’m happy with about 25% of it at this point. I like how Beige smacks the shoulder and I got a little reaction to that in Greeny. When Beige comes up and snorts, that’s pretty good as well.

It’s obvious to me now that to make the close up shot and the following shot to work right, I’m going to need to pad the frames coming in and out again, which means that I need to go to the audio source and give it a minor edit. I think there is plenty of background office noise to not cause a problem. When I asked about this, I found out that animators ask for this sort of thing all the time from the sound departments.

In fact, there is an interesting thing on the “Corpse Bride” dvd where it shows the audio clips they used edited all together with their original video reference of the voice talent. You can see that they rarely take three words in a row as they were read. Every word is edited together practically.

But I digress. I only have one more week to beat this beast into shape. How I wish that I had gone for a subtle acting piece at this point! I’d love to only be worried about brows and eyelids and cheeks instead of contacts and body mechanics. Hindsight is annoying.

I can do it. I can. I can DO it. I CAN do it.

Can't I?

Updog - Part 06 (With Miles To Go Before I Sleep)

Even though I put in work on this piece, I couldn’t tell you why it’s any better at all. I’m not sure that it is. My only consolation is that I didn’t have a ton of time to put in this past week.

What I DID do is I eliminated the intersecting and got a little more weight on his hand lean, although currently it feels too abrupt. The “or” arc is feeling better but it still needs to be reworked.

I included Greeny looking down at the hand before we go to the close up shot, again big thanks to Jason. A killer suggestion in that too, because now I have more time to show Greeny’s reaction to Beige because I don’t have to have that extra beat for him to look at the hand and get angry. Now the close up starts angry.

I got the arcs on his head and hand right before the shoulder slap to work much better. Before Beige’s hand was passing right through Greeny’s face. Geometrically, this move wouldn’t work in real life, but in real life, peoples heads aren’t the size of beach balls either, so I’m willing to cheat it a bit.

Also thinking back to one of our recent lectures, I wanted to add in a touch of anticipation for some dialogue, so I added the slight head shake before “nothing.” Of course, as it stands, it’s not very slight at all. I will have to tone it down a touch.

All of a sudden I feel super stressed out about how much I have left to do on this piece before the end of the term in two weeks. Somehow, I have gotten way behind without realizing it. On my last piece, I had three weeks to concentrate on the face alone. But now I have to add the phoneme shapes, get the weight and arcs working all correctly, and get the face polish to the level of my last piece. Yikes! The crazy thing is, I'm no further behind most people in my class. In fact, most people are worse off than me. But everyone is saying "don't worry." But I'm worried.

I, like many of my fellow students, at times feel burnt out on this crazy schedule, which involves work and school and family. Currently, AM takes about 20 to 30 hours of my time a week in lectures and homework. I have been so very inactive on the forums and fellow AM'ers workspaces leaving comments. I'm just too strapped for time. I’m very jealous of those that don’t have to hold down a full time job while working at AM as well. If I have any regrets about my AM experience, its that somehow I didn’t secure enough cash so I could go through school and not have to work. I know it will all be worth it in the end. I’ve already learned more in the past year than I would have thought possible.

So stiff upper lip and all that. Now get back to work.

Updog - Part 05 (We'll all Float On Ok)

So the obligatory thing for animators to do, from what I've observed, is to change their splines from stepped to flat or smooth ins and outs and then when they are forced to show it to anyone, as I am psuedo-forced to show it here, is to complain about how bad it looks. So here goes.

*Ahem........This is an awful looking spliney mess. *

(insert fanfare and applause here.)

I think it all is a reaction to seeing how piss poor the arcs are. When it's in stepped mode, everyone's imagination is filling in the gaps between poses. When it is splined, well, the computer takes over and shows you what a crap job your imagination does at interpolating mathematical vectors. So it's a moment of clarity between what you thought you had and what you really have. The truth hurts baby.

Hi ho hi ho, it's off to fix my arcs, weight, timing and whatnot I go.

Updog - Part 04 (Last train to splinesville)

Hello you,

This week I put in work adding yet even more breakdowns and keys on the early parts of the shot. I didn’t have as much time as usual this week due to “real life” concerns. Darn that real life always getting in the way. But I still feel happy with where I’m at. I think the attitude of Beige is reading well. He seems like a punky little brewster up to no good.

Not sure how verbose I can be at this stage about what my thought processes are. I think a lot of the middle work is just rubber to the road, butt to the seat, hand grafted to mouse time. There is still plenty here that I don’t like. Next week I must get out of stepped mode.

Updog - Part 03 (Blocking 2: Electric Hullabaloo)

I swear that you must be stalking me.

So here we go again. This week I have added a few more poses and some breakdowns. It seems to be ever still crawling towards the finish line. For the exception of additional poses and breakdowns, there have only been some slight (but important) changes to the blocking from last week. Some of the most notable are…

The old pose at 92 was weak and not clear. I had him leaning in towards the other character while he was waiting. But honestly, I knew it was a weak pose when I was planning it and sort of dropped that one in as a “good pose goes here” placeholder. I decided to have him change it to a cocky-sort-of-relaxed-weight-on-one-arm type pose, you know the one. I thought that would provide some good contrast to go into his quick smear type move over to Greeny.

Also as it was, when Greeny removed Bishops hand from his shoulder, he took it out of frame towards the bottom. My mentor aptly noted that the two shots would hook up better if greeny moved it out screen right and the left to right movement continuted into the next shot, which seems amazingly obvious to me now, but I’m not sure if I ever would have thought of that myself. So I changed that. The two shots seem to hook up much better that way, thanks Jason.