AN02 - Final Week

Can I tell you guys right now that these past twelve weeks have just flown by??  It's crazy!  I am just so grateful for the past two mentors I have had.  They have really changed the way I animate for the better and I think I have already become a better animator having them as my mentors. 

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 This past week was my last week having Steve Cady as my mentor.   Steve has taught me so much about rhythm, timing, spacing, and I just thoroughly enjoyed every minute of his class.  Here is my final reel for the class, along with my assignments from my first semester at Animation Mentor...

You may notice there are some changes to the most recent assignment, if you would like to see the updated version of just that shot and me explaining what I changed, I have posted it here for your viewing pleasure!

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This past week I also went through and adjusted most of those poses that I created from this semester based on the critiques I received for them from Steve.  So below are the revised poses on the right and the original poses on the left...

And now onto the next semester!  Unfortunately there's not really a break, at least I get a weekend where I'm not up until 5am haha.  I'm super excited to start the next semester with my new mentor, Steve Cunningham!

AN02 - Fourth Assignment Wk.5

Hey guys!  So I just finished the last week of my last assignment for Animation Body Mechanics Basics, these past 11 weeks have sure flown by!  Since this is the last assignment week, next week's post will be updated poses and my demo reel from the class.

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Alright guys, this week for our assignment we had to add the "final 10%" to our animations.  I had a lot of suggestions from Steve for my assignment, some that I was eager to change and others I was more aggravated that I had to change.  If there's one thing I've learned throughout this class is that my teacher knows what he is talking about so I need to just suck it up and change those sections of the animation because it will look 10x better afterwards.  Seriously, I was all like, gaaahhh I don't want to change the gun motions at the end and the recoil looks fine to me!  I wish I could travel back in time and smack myself, I was wrong, I changed it and it looks better.  You'd think I could have gotten that through my thick skull already, but anyway, here's the version of the animation that I submitted...

So I don't know if you guys can really tell, but I think it's looking a lot better than last week's version.  This week I'll have a few things to tweak on it and then I'll go ahead and add it to my demo reel!
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*Update* - So I wanted to post the updated version of this shot because I tweaked some things before putting it in my reel.  So, with these tweaks, I added a little more overlap with the arm movement when she recoils from that drastic move, adjusted some timing with the legs to add interest, adjusted the eyes some, took out some of the gun actions at the end to put emphasis on the placing of the feet, as well as adjusted the hips slightly so there's more of a weight shift when she goes to take that small step.  Overall I'm pretty happy with it, I may even render it at some point, but here it is!

AN02 - Fourth Assignment Wk.4

Hey guys!  So this past week we had to create more of a polishing pass for our animations.
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My mentor gave me a lot of good critique that I took into account when going through my first polishing pass.  Some of the critique I was aggravated with at first, like my mentor said I needed to take out the stretch on the leg completely.  I was all like, why would I take out all the stretch on the leg when I'm trying to go for lots of exaggeration?  Turns out my mentor knows what he's talking about, crazy I know, and my animation looks tons better by taking out the crazy stretch in the leg.  Another major issue he pointed out was that the hips were not traveling in an interesting path, they were more translating across the screen rather un-interestingly, as well as looking like they were hitting a wall.  So I made adjustments and here's my most recent pass...

Now I'm off to see what my mentor has to say about it!

AN02 - Fourth Assignment Wk.3

Hey everyone!  So this past week we had to bring our shots from the blocking pass to blocking plus, which is basically first spline pass.  I really wanted to go cartoony and exaggerated with this shot so I added some stretch in the arms, legs, and torso. Here's what I submitted...

I'm not completely happy with the way it turned out but I still have two weeks to polish it out.  We'll see what Steve says!

AN02 - Fourth Assignment Wk.2

        Hey guys!  So this week we had to take our planning and reference video and start to make our locomotion animations come to life!  First off, for my animation, I had to take off the end bit from the reference of me falling in order to make the animation fit in the 250 frames limit.  I know, I know, it would have been hilarious and awesome if it could still be there but I'm fairly certain that, if I had tried to fit that in, I would not be able to play with the timing of the rest of the actions in the shot and it would have just been a garbled mess.

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So here is my first blocking pass...

        So far I'm liking this animation!  I was able to use some of the stretch controls on Stella, which made making some of the poses pretty fun.  Also, my memory is not the best, so when I went to constrain the hand to the chair at the beginning of the shot I received much help from my friend, Nick, who helped me figure out the best way to go about constraining the hand to the object in the most efficient way.  One of my peers mentioned that her head is leaned back for the majority of the animation so I might adjust that, we'll see what my mentor says.

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On a side note, I got my first contract animator position this past week!  Yay!