Life in The Fuzzy Factory

The Greatest Latest

2007-03-16T01:16:00.000-07:00

Click here for Divx version (15 mb)

And for your clicking amusement, here is my demo reel!

It was a long three months after school before I had this sucker in shape for review. I got some great tips and pointers from AnimationMentor on the best way to present all of my pieces that you see here. A few small tweaks, some added lights for the renders and ‘voila’ there it was, my new demo reel.

It was hard to sit and polish on the same pieces that I’ve been working on for over a year. But I wanted to really put them to rest by making them as good as I could, weaseling out all of the little things that had been nagging at me all of this time.

And it led to some great success! I feel super lucky and very happy to announce that I’ve landed a contract animator position at Tippett Studios in Berkeley, barely a stones throw from my house. My timing was nearly perfect on completing my reel as I got it done just when Tippett was in their big hiring push for the movie ‘The Spiderwick Chronicles’, base off of the popular book series. So now it’s official, I’m a feature film animator! Wooohooooo!

I started at Tippett just last week and so far I’m loving every minute of it. It is a very friendly, relaxed (yet professional) atmosphere full of some of the most talented folks that I’ve ever worked along side of. I’ve started on my first shot and I can’t wait to see how it looks rendered and composited into the live action plate. So far the experience has been great.

I have to extend a big THANK YOU to my wife Season, AnimationMentor, and all of my fellow students who supported me and encouraged me and basically made it possible for me to have arrived at this point. I still have a long journey ahead of learning how to be a better and better animator and artist (one that will never end, I hope.) But this is a good time to take a pause and a breath and let everyone know just how thankful and lucky I feel.

I have gotten so many warm congratulations from my fellow alumni that I was taken aback at how generous they are were. I will always feel fortunate to have participated in the very first class at AM and to be part of such a supportive group of die-hard animators. We have all sacrificed blood, sweat and tears with no guarantee of success in a highly competitive field. And yet it seems that most feel lucky to have had the opportunity to learn from some of the great animators of our time. I hope to see everyone of them achieve their dreams.

Missing Persons Report

2007-01-15T11:51:00.000-08:00

You and me have a lot of catching up to do. So sit right back and get yourself a hot cuppa joe and let’s dish dirt.

The first thing I want to do is to sincerely offer all the dear readers a huge and hearty thank you. Thank you for commenting on my posts. Thank you for asking where I’ve been. Thank you for showing interest. I think because of you I am re-motivated to keep writing this blog and keep chronicling my misadventures in animation for all to point and laugh at. For all that can’t check out the H.264 codec, I am right now compressing all of the movies in a windows friendly form and will have links below all of the old posts' images for you to click on.

What happened? The last few months of school were an exercise in sleep deprivation and burning fumes. Despite my best intentions to keep things short and sweet, my piece kept creeping longer and longer. I knew that it was already a challenging proposition to get a minute of quality animation done in three months time, even if you are able to work on it full time, which I wasn’t. But there comes a point when you ask yourself what’s the best thing you can do for your short and mine was to give each scene the amount of frames it needed to get good acting and tell the story right.

The downside of all of this of course was that I had to make some pretty serious sacrifices to make time to even get a chance of getting this short done, the least of which was abandoning this blog for a period. You’re too old for me to lie to you dear reader, the last three months of school was probably one of the most difficult and stressful times of my life. But here I am all bright and shiny on the other side of h-e-double hockey sticks and I’m still smiling and seemingly no worse for wear.

School officially ended in early October. There was an option to extend classes by three more months at half price when school realized that the majority of students were struggling to finish. I was tempted for exactly half a second but then realized what that meant as far as the commitments I had made to my wife, family and friends. I had to turn down the offer.

For the three months following that, it was a lot of picking up the pieces of my life. I put most everything on hold and had quite a bit of catching up to do (and I still do in fact.) Starting in mid November, I began putting together a reel and started polishing that which needed it the most.

I’m happy to report that many of my fellow AM’ers have met with some great success through just the school’s alumni website alone. It would appear that the studios have been approaching the school asking for people and the school has been directing them towards people who have work that may be a good fit. It took me a long time to get my reel posted on the website after school ended. I’m sure that hurt me much more than helped but at the time I was thinking that I didn’t want to show my reel before it was ready and felt it was wiser to wait. Hindsight is 20/20 as they say.

So far students have placed at ILM, Dreamworks, Sony and BlueSky. I’m sure there have been many more that have landed great stuff than that, but that is all that I’m currently aware of. It’s very inspiring to me. Sadly, Disney and Pixar are going to have a round of layoffs in February so they aren’t currently hiring and that has made Sony initiate a hiring freeze in anticipation of snatching up some of that laid off talent (one presumes.) I’m not sure if this is particularly the best time for a junior animator to be hunting for a feature position but perhaps I over think things.

Coming up next, my reel, my short, my word!

Nows for the Animation

2006-08-07T23:08:00.000-07:00

So for the last four weeks we’ve been blocking our film. We made a first pass at rough blocking and now is the second pass of “blocking plus.” I’ve been working my tail feathers off.

However that did not stop me from going to see John K. give a talk at a retrospective about his work. I went with the talented Mike Stern and It was a heck of a good time. I got to see “Boo Boo Runs Wild” again. I’ve been trying to find that thing forever and I can’t seem to get a hold of it. To me, that is animation that clarifies why some gags just can’t be written down in a script. There is something about him running around and grunting like a maniac that kills me everytime.

Also I spent a fun-filled evening with some AM cohorts tossing the pigs. That’s right, you heard me. Even though, sadly, I felt my self-imposed production schedule didn’t allow for me to go to Siggraph or ComicCon, I got out of the house a bit and was reminded that AM has built such a great community of people. That’s worth the price of admission alone.

So the biggest news of all is that I’ve had a bit of a breakthrough. I feel so energized at this point to knock this thing out of the park. In the beginning, I have to admit that it was a bit like pulling teeth for me to get back into the flow of working and schooling after the laid back three months of planning the short. There were days during the first pass of blocking where I had a hard time concentrating. My brain gots its lazy on.

But now I’ve finally broken through that wall where this animation is mostly what I think about during my waking hours. I feel a genuine excitement to sit down and get to work. It is the absolute best. I tend to be a bit obsessive about things. I don’t get into stuff just a little bit. Sometimes it’s tricky to get myself into positive things, instead of fixating on radio control cars or board games. There’s time for that stuff later. Now’s for the animations.

Let’s see, what has transpired over the last month since the pitch. I was going to use the heavier (polite version of fatter) AM character of Otto. I liked the idea of the contrast between the fatty and the flying. But I did some pose tests of Otto and his shape seemed to always lean towards the ball and I don’t think I could have gotten the kind of lines and posing out of him that I was hoping for. So I’m sticking with good old Bishop. I like Bishop quite a bit actually. I think he’s a great character with lot of appeal and he looks young but at the same time ageless in my opinion.
The story has remained fairly the same as the pitch. There are additions of just a few more shots to clarify things but not much else. I still have some obvious timing adjustments to make. Some shots don’t last long enough, some are way too slow. Things that look perfect to me one day will appear completely off the next. Such is the creative process, I suppose. I'm still struggling a bit with his initial poses when lying on the ground. I'd love to have him lay flat on his chest, but his head is too big to get any type of pose that doesn't look like his neck is broken. But right now he clearly seems to have one-armed-syndrome. So I shall toil on it some more.

Not much more to say, so here is a playblast of the first half of the film approximately. Because it’s a playblast, all of the clouds appear to have hard edges, but they won’t when I render. The sky texture doesn’t look quite right in the playblast either. Rendered it looks good. Trust me. Now you will have some surprises for later. Ooooooooooohhhhh I can sense your excitement. It’s palpable. Look, I’m palping it right now.

Palp palp palp.

Formal Story Pitch: The Wizard of Stupid

2006-07-13T00:26:00.000-07:00

My story pitch was a bit rough for me. We were supposed to act out the idea as much as possible. But since I was on a bit of a vacation while working on this, I got the opportunity to doodle some thumbnails. Some are good, some not so much, but all are small and quickly made, so that is a victory in it's own right. Not to mention, I drew the drawings in my pitch over the course of three or four days whilest sipping mojitos. Well, not exactly mojitos, they were margaritas. Ok, they were Coors lights. Fine, half a Fanta out of a Styrofoam cup. Thanks for killing the dream.

The upside being that I didn't have to act out much as I could hide behind my storyboards. I kinda know that school is for getting better at this stuff, but I also kinda know that in a real world situation, I'd have a pointer and legibly sized storyboards tacked up to the wall. Not to mention, my pitch most likely wouldn't be put on permanent record and published for all the world to download, youtubed, mocked, altered, re-youtubed and blogged about. Although, the paypal pity would be nice.

DISCLAIMER: I'm still a bit hesitant to put this out there on the internets because I seem to have no end of hatred for watching myself on anything, mirrors included, but quite simply what you are about to witness is nothing short of me in a compromised position on the internet. I know better than this. Did Star Wars kid teach us nothing? Not only am I wearing an uber-cool pair of headphones with the microphone built right in (think Kathy, the friendly customer service representative in India) but I'm also trying to sound enthusiastic and not my usual monotone deadpan. So surprisingly, for some reason, take after take I had a strange cadence and intonation to my voice. I got this sing-songy-sort-of-thing going on that can only remind me of Jack Horkheimer. This is not how I normally talk. Usually I'm much more effeminate with a subtle touch of mucus.

Sigh. It all reminds me of why I'm an animator in the first place. Being in front of the camera gives me pleasure equal to deworming cats. I spent the last 10 years hiding behind drawings for a living. So please, I beg of you, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, and this time no dogs allowed.

I just got that carpet done.

No one said Haiku couldn't rhyme.

2006-07-12T16:16:00.000-07:00

Blog Haiku apology,

Long time, no sign on
Was too unsure to pine on.
Please forgive me, mon.

No one said Haiku couldn't rhyme.

Well a whole semester went by and I barely posted a thing. Can I be depended on anymore for consistent blogging sustenance? Is it worth going through the 18 hour process of fighting html code and browser compatibility issues to establish a solid RSS feed to my bloggy blog? Most likely, no in all cases. I can promise however to post more frequently than last semester, once. That is to say, if I post just slightly more than never, I’ve held up my part of this bargain.

So, how was last semester you may ask? Well if you were there in AM, then you already know and you should quit reading this instantly and get back to work on your short, you slacker. If you are a visitor from the outside world, than Google must have failed you to dead end you at this html-hole. But so it goes.

Last semester was…how do you say…difficult, to say the least. But refreshingly, it was difficult in a completely different way than before. Instead of cramming in long hours on animation between pesky “life” we had to come up with pitches for short films. I found that there was nothing tougher than committing to a single idea that not only will dominate my lives for the next six months, but will also be the primary staple in my demo reel. So it was “hurry up and think” for a bit. I’m certain now on hind sight that the harder you think the worse you are at coming up with original, witty ideas that will only take a minute to represent.

For the informal pitch, I came in with six ideas. Most, strangely enough, had to do with the main characters getting in wrestling matches with inanimate objects. Actually to try to keep the projects in scope, we were told to keep it to one or two characters and a single prop and ideally under a minute. So I tried to stay by those guidelines in my thinking.

As it turned out, my least favorite idea was the one that seemed to hit with everyone in my Q&A session. So that was the one that I was to move forward with and work up a more formal story pitch. I was unhappy with all of my ideas, truth be told. To me the perfect example of the one minute or so animation without too many characters has to be Luxo Jr. I wouldn’t even know how to sum that short up in a pitch and make it sound nearly as great as it turned out to be. I imagine the pitch would be something like this…

"Ahem

So there’s this lamp right. And it’s just sitting there, um, on. And then there is this ball that comes in a bumps it. And then…another smaller lamp comes into screen after the ball and then pushes it off screen. You with me so far? O.K. good. And then it, the little lamp comes back on screen and jumps on the ball and, um, pops the ball, yeah that’s it. Then the lamps are sad until the little one finds another ball and the big lamp is like, lamps will be lamps.

So what do you guys think?"

[insert cricket chirping here]

But it’s one of the best freaking films on the planet and is many's inspiration for getting into all of this in the first place. I was trying to keep this in mind while thinking on an idea for my film. I tried, with all of my might to stay away from the space army attacking the deep in stellar outpost of snot-bugs. Most of my ideas kept developing into three minute stories. Or five minute mini-epics or full blown trilogies with special extended versions and small statuetttes.

So what was the pitch that won the hearts and minds of my fellow AM students and Mentors?

There is a boy with a radio control plane. He is flying the plane in a big blue sky. The plane swoops past the camera and out of frame, but when it returns, we see that it is the boy that is flying instead.

I had/have a lot of work to do.
Stay tuned and I will post my formal pitch in a few.

Thanks.

Like sands through the hour glass...

2006-04-12T00:34:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-04-02T13:45:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-04-02T13:00:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-04-02T12:22:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-04-02T11:40:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-04-02T11:31:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-04-02T11:11:00.000-07:00

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.

Updog - Part 02 (Block Party All Up In Here)

2006-03-07T23:13:00.000-08:00

Fancy meeting you here.

The next bit of progress on this piece has been sort of a blur for me. After jumping around in front of my webcam like a siezure monkey, I got a few poses that I liked. I hopped on my sketchpad and tried to get them all down. Then in accordance with the Victor Navarone method, I really tried to figure out the sequence that would give me the best reversals, contrast and clarity. I also wanted to really focus on the tempo of the main character. There is so much great energy in the dialogue piece.

The other character doesn’t have much role in the whole piece other than to get angry and possibly threatening. I will have to brain storm and see if I can’t spice it up a bit.

Also, in general, I wanted to push the poses to a “cartoony” level that I haven’t messed around with. I keep trying to remind myself that I’m not animating a piece that will decide my future fate as to whether I will be able to break into the animation industry and realize my dreams before I’m old and die, but more that I’m having fun and experimenting with different techniques. So fun, right? Ha ha heee ho, crap.

I was particularly concerned that many of my poses were too cliché. But I lost confidence that I know what cliché is. It is quite a challenge to come up with poses that instantly read to 99% of the population on the planet but don’t read as cliché or something that anyone has seen before. But something just felt right to me about the pacing and the movement, so cliché poses be damned; I’m going to give these a try.

I do always wonder if the different studios look for different styles of animators. Is a cartoony style a sure fire way not to get into Pixar or is that good, what would dreamworks do, would Blue Sky love it? How much does subtlety of emotion and movement count? I don’t know. I’m not sure if it is thought of in this way when people review a reel or maybe it’s exactly how they think of it.. From what I’ve heard, some people get a reputation for being an “actor” animator and others get a rep for having good “weighty” animation. I’d be happy to be in either class as long as I’m animating professionally. Too much neurotic worrying, I’m sure. I should just shut up and have fun. Ha hee ho hee fun.

I should stop writing now.

Updog - Part 01 (Stick Figure Theater)

2006-02-26T23:20:00.000-08:00

And on to our next piece, we are starting a multi-character shot, as previously mentioned. I spent a great deal of time this week searching through hours and hours of movies trying to find just the right bit of dialogue. I wanted something physical, super emotional and dramatic. Tears, yes, I wanted tears and hopefully some shouting. Well as it turns out, it’s hard to find a piece that encapsulates well into 10-15 seconds that is dramatic. Everything I found had such slowly delivered dialogue that in 10-15 seconds, it was hard to find audio with more than two lines in it, much less a snappy little back and forth between characters that made any sense what so ever.

So at the nth hour, I went with a clip of the American version of “The Office.” It seemed that it would fit the bill of physical, but not so dramatic. Oh well, I’ll settle for funny any day. Plus Steve Carell has a great voice to animate to. Give him a year or two and he will be in an animated film for sure, I’d bet money on it. Oh wait, I just IMDB’ed the guy to find out if I spelt his name correctly and as it turns out, he’s in “Over The Hedge” as Hammy. So I just won our little bet just now. Pay up sucka.

This movie for your perusal is the mostest basicest blocking layout anyone has seen ever. I didn’t even put their arms down. How about that for lazy! But it gets the idea across and tells me that the cuts will flow alright. And that is the whole point.

So dear reader, thank you for your kind attention. Lavish me with comments and I will see you sometime around Feburary 11th!!!

Whoosh!

Secrets - Part 08 (Aude Land Mine)

2006-02-26T16:10:00.000-08:00

Holy moses, it’s been awhile.

Big changes are afoot and I will update you one post at a time the way I shoulda oughta in the past. So pay no attention to the posting dates, we’ll pretend like now was then.

*swirly whirleys and bubbly noises*

Hello, here we are Feburary fourth no less. How did it get here so fast? Sure, I’ve been super busy, but never too busy to keep up with my blogging! After all, I have my priorities. At AnimationMentor it’s a bit like the new year in the Advanced Acting Class. Out with the old and in with the new. So dear reader, for your bemusement, I present not one but two, count ‘em, two animations to gander at.

Good news and bad news. School has adopted a new file format (codec H.264 for all of you with tape on your glasses) which will require one and all to have the latest version of Quicktime 7.x installed on your machine. If you don’t’ have it, you can get it here…
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/standalone.html
The good news is the files are quite a bit smaller. So enjoy the tiny-ness of bleeding edge technology.

Ok, so now that that bit of unpleasantness is out of our way, I present to you “I Lied” as done as it’s going to be for a few months. It’s looking pretty good. It still needs some polish and some set dressing and some hair, in case you thought I forgot. But it’s the piece that I’m the proudest with and I’m not going to call it names just yet.

Secrets - Part 07 (Beating a Horse Dead)

2006-01-31T23:36:00.000-08:00

Click above for animation. Bigger than either of us like.

So did you miss me? For the first week I missed a blog post since I’ve started blogging and that is actually an apt indicator for how ungodly busy I’ve been over the last few weeks. I’ve working at my J.O.B, been putting out a few feelers for jobs since I anticipate quite possibly being on the unemployed line (or couch) by the end of this month and trying to step up my participation in planning my wedding. So what’s been happening with my AM schooling, you may ask? Don’t you want to ask? Fine don’t ask, see what I care.

Oh let’s not fight. You know I can’t stay mad at you.

As it turned out, two weeks ago JasonS was having some computer issues, as are known to happen at the least convenient times and got the crits to us a little later than he would have preferred, but still got them through by Thursday morning. Gladly, I had plans to leave town for the weekend so, sadly, I didn’t have much more time that Thursday day to finish up that week’s effort. But the notes on the shot were pretty minimal so I was able to address them in time and post on Friday evening.

Which brings us to last week when I got even more great notes back on the piece and attempted to address them for the “final” shot this week. Can’t say that I’m supper happy with this piece yet, but it seems to have its plusses. I’m going to take one more go at it and then get some space. I tried to give certain movements of hers more weight, like when she slumps back into the chair, but it seemed to throw off the tempo a touch. I’m not sure I can offer you much insight into what I’m thinking on this piece right now. I think I’m at full saturation and when I give this piece the slightest glance my brain goes all wet noodle on me.

I can tell you that I spent a good amount of time shaping her eyelids and that was the first time I found anything in the process of creating this whole piece to be tedious. I have no idea if I’m doing it “correctly” as well. But I do like having the time to put so much attention to detail, something that doesn’t happen in my workplace nearly enough due to understandable budget and scheduling constraints. So step through it with your arrow keys, dear reader, and notice how her pupils exert the slightest influence of how the lid is shaped. Gasp at how detailed animation can be. Awe at the rivers of patience that pre-requisite such an undertaking. Behold the mightiness of my subliminally noticeable subterfuge.

Meanwhile, I am going to move forward on blocking a new shot in the next week that will take me through the end of this semester. The focus is on creating a multi-character shot, so two characters this time, not one talking to disembodied voice off screen. I have the amazingly daunting task of picking out an audio clip to live with for the duration of the project. Something that drives me crazy with second guessing choices, strategizing demo reels and twirling around in place going dee dee dee laa laa weeeeee, phbbbbbt snort.

Hopefully, I will choose wisely.

Secrets - Part 0M6! (Facial Funtasy)

2006-01-18T22:23:00.000-08:00

Click above for animation. About 4MB.

Well, Animation Mentor came through with a near flawless script that popped off that old pesky expressionless head and surgically attached a new and improved Bishop melon that has full facial controls on it. Bravo for AM and namely Taylor Mahony for pulling off such a complex and, quite frankly, daunting task for hundreds of students, so that we can all move our shots forward, twirling into the future. Wooot!

So getting in there and messing around, I got all giddy. The face has a fantastic range, distorting into some of the goofiest mugs I’ve seen in an animated character available in a school. Her brow was completely lost in her bangs and the hair had to be unparented to make the head swap anyways so I decided to move forward with her uber-pig-tails hidden for now. Fret not, dear reader, for they have promised to return. For now, try not to judge her for her shiny golden brown baldness.

The only down side to the head swapping script is that eye direction and blink animation were not transferable. But actually all during break, I noticed how cock-eyed the "Secrets - Part 5" thumbnail is for the video. So perhaps it is a blessing in disguise that I was prompted to go back and rework the eyes. I immediately set to work, recreating what I had previously done while adding in a few tweaks that I was dying to make since last semester. It felt very good to get back on the proverbial horse.

At first I was having a bit of trouble trying to figure out what my approach should be. Normally, I would lay out the animation pose to pose, but I had many poses already and I also had the muppet mouth flapping moves left over from last semester. So it struck me as a bit odd to go in there and start hitting expressions at certain times frames that would only hold for a few fractions of a second. I chose to work straight ahead with the brows first and the eye shapes next. After I had that done, I posted on Wednesday and got some great feedback on my piece from fellow AM’ers, which boosted my confidence a bit and turbo charged me into the rest of the week. I also got a days distance and saw some stuff that I was pushing way too much and other stuff that was timed very wrong. So I went a fixin’ and a tinkerin’ and got the beast beat into shape.

So once I had some of that cleaned up, I went in and animated the (drumroll please)……cheeks!!!! Yes, the cheeks. It sounds a bit stupid, actually, but this worked out fantastic. I really was able to focus on the eyes and brow movement and again I revisited the lids and got all of that working in harmony (I hope, I hope.) By the time I got to the mouth shapes and phoneme shapes, the whole thing was pulling together sans difficulty and it seems all the hand wringing that I was doing was for naught. Silly naughty naught.

So now that I look at it, UGGGH do I want to change some of the body movement. I see all of this stuff that I want to punch up and make more clear and weighty. I can’t believe I can think it is all good one week and come back another and see what I now see. I will never, ever have any confidence to judge my stuff again. I know for a fact know that I don’t know. But hey, perhaps that is a sign of improvement and knowing that I will never be done learning this stuff is sort of a big reason why it drives me so crazy for it in the first place (in a good way.) So I’m completely dying to hear what my mentor says and thinks and crits me for. I told him to go all out and pick me apart this semester as I hope to run with the big boys some day sooner than later. During the Q&A he said something that should be part of his voice box if ever a JasonS action figure was to be made...

"Honesty never has to be brutal."

Ok, so that is plenty of blathering for one week. Thanks again for your interest. You are my only fan.

Honey I'm home!

2006-01-14T00:05:00.000-08:00

Did you miss me? AnimationMentor.com's Term 4 : Advanced Acting Techniques began this week. I got a great mentor (again) and I am really looking forward to the next three months. Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce, Mr. Jason Schleifer! *insert fanfare here*

clicky clicky to see whatup in Jason's world

Jason was hired onto New Zealand’s very own WETA as a character rigger for Lord of the Rings. By the third installment of the trilogy, he had moved up to character animator and brought us all the joy and magic of watching Gollum trick us all into believing that
1. even creatures from retched swamps have goals
2. big eyes can still tug on the heart-strings even if they are on toad-esque things, and that
3. in the end, drug addicts really can’t change.

And as if that wasn’t enough, he’s worked on Madagascar and the newest Shrek movie. Not only is he amazingly active in contributing significantly to the online 3d community, turns out he’s a hell of a nice guy to boot, but of course I’m saying that before receiving my first grade, so I will keep you posted.

The other big news about school is that the entire site has been revamped and affectionately named “v2.” It works loads better than before. AnimationMentor.com’s public page has gotten a face-lift as well and even has some students work on it, which sadly, I’m not a part of, but happily, everyone who was chosen is more than deserving. “Climb the ladder, Monty.”

Well, I’m just trying to get back in the swing of things this week. I forget how difficult this school/working business is whenever I get back from a break, but I’m settling down. Turns out, I may be unemployed next month. That would give me all the time in the world for school, but very little else to fill the massive void that is my stomach. It may be time to dust off the old resume and see if I can’t pick up night work as a garbage man.

Thanks, once again, for your interest.

Secrets - Part 05 (Finding my Finale)

2005-12-12T22:51:00.000-08:00

click above to view. about 4mb.

Well, here it is.

Except for a few tiny spacing and timing adjustments, I was able to clean up all of my curves without too much of a hassle and get my arcs nailed down. It was the most painless time I’ve ever had of completing all of those finishing little touches, which makes me think either I’m getting the hang of this just a little bit, or that I got a lot of bit lucky. It took awhile longer than I had anticipated getting it done.

My mentor Dave Burgess left me two great major notes that I will incorporate into this piece. The first is that when she leans back in her chair, her shoulders and head hit at the same time. I will drag the head slightly. Great eye on that one and I wish I would have thought of that first! The second is that her dismissive hand gesture is a little big and I should scale down the anticipation a tad. I always had this feeling in my gut that it was a touch too in-your-face-ish and I'm actually kind of relieved he said something about it. Again spot on advice.

I started to rig and animate the pigtails on Sunday morning with just four hours to go until my deadline. I realize now just how incredibly rusty I am as a rigger. I got the right one working just fine but the left one was giving me a bit of grief. I will have to revisit it. Sad, because it’s seems to be just about the simplest thing to rig and I’ve tackled much tougher challenges in the past. Anyhow, I didn’t want to hand in sloppy work on her hair and have it distract from the main animation.

I’m about half way through animating her right pigtail. It really seems to add a lot to the piece. I will work on it over school break and have it done before class picks up again. So if you check my three-item list from last post, I only really finished one out of the three. But somehow, it doesn’t faze me much. I’m still very pleased with how it turned out. I find it very rare in both my professional and personal work to get the opportunity to work on something until you are more or less completely satisfied with it. It is surprisingly…satisfying.

So with a bit of reflection as I end my third quarter, it has been another just amazing semester at AnimationMentor. I can’t believe how much more confidence I have when approaching a shot. In addition, I really appreciate knowing how to plan and work it through to polish. This has been such an amazing experience that I will always be very grateful for. I look back and can’t believe that it has only been nine months so far. I can’t wait for the next nine.

I have been very lucky to get three mentors so far that I've had mountains of respect for and work very easily with. They have pushed and pulled me to new heights that I only dreamed of last year. It is always a bit sad to me to have the last critique from my mentors. I feel much closer to everyone in the school than I would have thought before I started. So this one is for DaveB, I hope our paths cross in the near future. Sniff.

I hope this finds you well and a big thank you for your interest.

Secrets - Part 04 (Rounding Third)

2005-12-05T12:33:00.000-08:00

Click image to watch animation. 4 mb or so.

Well, I learned a big lesson after reading my last post, that I should never write in my blog at 3 am.

The animation keeps creeping towards the finish line. There are a few things that bug me about it but overall I think I’m ready to chase down all of my arcs and get everything smoothed out. I made some changes this week from last with some little flourishes. Stuff I really focused on this week is…

1. again, the hands. I tried to get little rotations and flexing when the weight was put on and taken off of them. No one will see it, but I’m in love with the tiny pinky compression on her left hand between frames 159-172. Little things like that make me love being an animator.
2. getting proper anticipation for some of the bolder body weight shifts
getting better arcs on the head
3. finding more little gestures to liven up the dead spots.

I find that a lot of the workflow techniques that I learned doing children’s edutainment translate very well when it comes to animating in Maya as well. I found myself using techniques to trouble shoot similar to what I do in my daily production chores as a pixel monkey. I’d watch my piece and make a list of notes of everything that was bugging me. My first pass through, my list was a solid page long (notes I take in a batman spiral notebook from the 80’s that I found in a box of my childhood stuff.) The second pass through, it was about a half of the page. By the third and fourth, it was less than a dozen notes each time. I think right now my list of notes is the following…

1. Around 204 when her hand settles on the table, it flaps in a distracting way. Perhaps it’s just the way that it catches the light, I don’t know but it needs fixing.
2. The eye darts at the end around 314 are too even and regular. I need to vary the spacing or timing to make them interesting again.
3. Her left hand sort of slides and slips off the table as she starts to feel defeated. It seems a bit too floppy/sloppy to me. I need to film reference and figure out how to make that look more natural.
4. I’m still on the fence a bit about my decision to drop both hands beneath the table at 305. I used to have one up and drop it while the other one landed on the table. Eventually, I found that distracting. I liked having a progression of her boldly all over the table. As she discovers that she is busted, I wanted her to reduce and slither back behind the table. The hands decision seems to play into that, I’m concerned about how plain her posture is at that point. Perhaps it works best though, as all focus wanders to the eyes, right where I want it at that point.

Once I get my list cleared of everything, then I will move forward on the outstanding tasks in the following order…

a. track and smooth out all those arcs once you get everything else resolved.
b. remodel, rig, and animate her hair. Those pony tails are begging for some motion.
c. throw some more environment in behind her, a bookcase or a window or some such.

And hopefully after that, it will be demo reel worthy. Only one week left before it has to be final. It still seems to me that there is a lot to be done on this piece. No matter how far I get, it seems that there are miles to go before I can sleep again. Next week will be a doozy, but I have most of everything done and smoothing arcs is kind of fun and relaxing.

It really hit home this week how amazing it is to see just how powerful some students animation can be if they rig it themselves to have facial controls. It makes me very excited to get a hold of the next rev of the model that incorporates all of that. Personally, I’m glad that I followed the school’s intentions and didn’t alter the model. I think not having facial controls really worked best for me because I know for a fact that if I had facial controls, I would have focused waaaaay too much on all of that. This experience has made me such a strong believer in communicating more through body posture and eye movement than mouth shapes and knitted brows. I learned a lot with this piece.

But with that being said, I hope that the lack of facial expressions and phoneme shapes don’t make it too junior to put on my reel. Perhaps I will be able to take AM’s new rig and apply the same animation data and throw in expressions and mouth shapes someday. But I can’t see myself having that kind of time in the next 9 months while school is in session.

I will just focus on getting through the next week of AM polishing work while staying lucid at my jay oh bee and trying to make my wife smile from time to time. Again thanks for the interest, and I hope this week finds you well.

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

2005-11-24T02:32:00.000-08:00

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)

2005-11-21T11:29:00.000-08:00

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

2005-11-13T13:44:00.000-08:00

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

2005-11-11T16:13:00.000-08:00

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....

2005-11-11T13:30:00.000-08:00

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.

2005-11-11T12:02:00.000-08:00

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."