Frame by Frame

I haven't posted any of my life drawing in a while, so I decided to take pics of a couple that I did tonight. I've come a long way from that first class I took down in Irvine. I'm now using materials and methods that I haven't used before and its pretty cool. I now have a collection of charcoals which I use now instead of graphite which I used to use. The instructor is also way better since he actually gives some instruction every week. He also gives some pretty good critiquing while you're working so you can improve your drawings while your working on it to produce a better result. The top one was done in 20 minutes, and the bottom in an hour. I like the gesture better of the first, but the shading of the second.

Week 4 down. Our assignment this week was to do a heavy and a light ball bounce. I chose to do a beach ball and a depleted uranium ball. My final results. FYI, here is my 1 ball bounce. It's supposed to feel like a basketball or soccerball

Uncharted 2 is officially the best game ever made. It's a perfect blend of action and puzzles with jaw dropping graphics. The first thing you notice, is that this game is absolutely beautiful. The game opens on you in a train car hanging of a cliff, and you need to climb back up (this is a third person game). While the path is pretty "linear", it has you going around all 4 sides of the outside, as well as the interior of the train. With each step you take the environment around you changes. Seats fall, poles bend, wheels and rocks, and trains fall. This is a very nice introduction to this game's awesome movement mechanics. You can climb up walls much like in Price of Persia or Assassin's Creed, but it feels much more spontaneous and integrated better than those two. Even around the battles you can scale walls and signs to get a vertical advantage on your enemy. Climbing is also mixed with stealth. Uncharted 2 has an almost perfect cover system. It feels kind of li...

And just to brighten up everyone's day, I went to Fenton's (as seen in UP, and yes, it is a real place if you didn't know) and I found this hanging on the wall. Yup, that's Carl, Russel, and Dug sitting in front of Pixar's rendition of Fenton's in their "UP" world. If that picture doesn't put a smile on your face, I don't know what will.

So it's been a while and I thought I'd drop by with some progress. The first couple of weeks of AM are over, and this week we get to start our first animation. A simple ball bounce with the weight of a basketball or soccerball. What we did last week was do some live sketches in a public place, just simple gestures. Mine are crappy stick figures. But we picked out best, and posed it out in Maya with our "Stu" rig. Here is what I came up with. Since then, I've done a few more live sketches, with more....stationary people. At a restaurant, and at a wedding. The first ones I did at a buffet, and found there were a lot of round shapes, if you know what I mean. Pocket sized sketchbook. Then earlier today I was at a wedding and brought my sketchbook with me. Got a couple good ones.

So I've kind of taken to this whole pen sketching/gesturing thing. I kind of enjoy how dynamic it all looks and how this is teaching me a lot about how to keep things more simple. The first couple of pages I did last night after I posted the previous blog entry. I have to say I'm very pleased with the results I got from the axe holder sketches. Most of the following female ones I'm pretty pleased with as well. The one with the cowboy hat stands out as being the least strong of the bunch.

After about half a year or so of wanting to get this book (and the second volume as well) I finally got it ordered through Amazon as a birthday gift (thanks Mom!). Man, I totally should have gotten this book sooner. It is seriously filled with typed gold. Not only was I really engaged by the book, I learned A LOT about drawing, gestures, and how to see than I've learned in.....well just about ever. I mean, I've never had a formal training session other than a few weeks of life drawing so I can't compare it to anything...but the way it's changed my style and how I approach drawing in like 3 days is pretty amazing. (Note: this could also just be because I suck at drawing and I would have known this had I taken a formal class in school =P ) But anyways. I've scanned in a couple pages of PEN sketches that I just did. I've for some reason fallen in love with drawing dresses/cloth at the moment so there's a lot of that going on. Most of the them I'm satisfied ...

So my Animation Mentor journey has finally officially begun. On Monday I got to access the full campus, and got to see who my mentor would be, as well as my classmates. I spoke to a couple of them that day. There are actually 5 people in my class from around me, so that's pretty cool. My mentor is Jon Collins, an animator at Pixar :) There are actually a lot of Pixar animators teaching the Basic Foundations class, including Victor Navone. We got to meet him formally last night in the Q&A. He seems like a pretty cool guy and was encouraging to us over the camera not to be shy our first time. I was a bit scared before I went up, but it's not so bad. I think I'll get used to it pretty quick. No homework really, just set up our profiles and introduce ourselves to our mentor. Done and done. I've since watched the whole lecture, which was basically just an introduction, and the Maya training videos. I installed the AM tools, which is pretty cool. I never realized how cust...