Frame by Frame

Demo Reel Summer 2011 from Daniel Wong on Vimeo .

And so ends my long journey through AM, but my education is FAR from being complete. The last 12 weeks I think I've made some big strides, but I still need tons of practice. The reel that I ended up with isn't really that complete. My final shot isn't finished, and only have two other pantomime shots with the simpler rig. I definitely need to do a lot more acting and dialog shots for myself and get those as good as I can get them. As of now though, I'm pretty tired of looking at the work that I've done, and I'm not sure if I'll carry on polishing those shots. I need at least one more reel worthy acting shot for my reel before I even want to think about applying anywhere for a job. There's some really tough competition out there from both pros and my classmates, and I need to get myself up to that level. For now though...some much needed rest.

It's been a whole half of the class since I've updated the blog last. I'm glad to say that since then I've learned A LOT. Physicality is only the beginning. Just when you start getting kind of OK with mechanics, we're thrown into intro to acting. Starting to get to the real meat of animation. And man, you've gotta think about a lot. Giving the shot a context, and giving reason for movement. Making the poses read clear for the attitude you want to convey. Clarity is the key. Here is my first pantomime shot. We were supposed to make our character go from one emotion to another or "changing gears." I think I did a fairly decent job on my first try, but it still needs a lot of work. Right now we're working on our first dialog shot, and holy crap its different from anything we've done so far. We're given the full body rig (Bishop) but only with a simple face. This is so we do most of the acting through the body. Now in our shots we are bound to ...

Here's a reel of all my work so far for the first 3 classes.

Here's the final version of my latest and last shot for Class 2.

So the last shot of class 2 has been finaled, which means I'm now pretty much done with Class 2. One more goodbye Q&A with my awesome mentor Martin Hopkins, and a progress reel and I'm done!......for 2 days until class 3. Anyways, it's been about 6 months since I've started AM and I've come a long way. I figured that I would sit down and give myself a self-assessment on my skills and what I think my current weaknesses and skills are. Overall, I think I'm doing pretty well. Not to sound braggy, but my work tends to feel better than most of my class. But maybe that's just me. I can achieve a pretty high level of polish with my shots pretty easily, although I'm not sure if thats not smoothness more than polish. But my arcs are pretty good, my spacing feels nice, and I have pretty good weight. I think I have a pretty good understanding of mechanics so far, but I took a look at next quarter's syllabus and it looks like we're going to learn a lot o...

Viola, final product. Much much better than last week I think.

Tackled those splines for the first pass, and this was the result. A bunch of stuff got changed when I was editing the curves, but it was definitely for the better. Now everything seems to be working properly. Only a few troubled parts, but I've got another week until the final is due. Definitely ahead of schedule this time.

Man, adding a freaking spine and head into a character really starts to complicate things. I was doin fine on a ball with legs so I felt fairly confident doing a series of Parkour actions for my next shot. Not only is just doing a run challenging for the first time with a spine, but transitioning into and out of runs from rolls and slides is quite challenging. Even though there were no arms on this character, it probably would have helped a little to maintain balance and to create momentum for certain moves. I was left to create it with the legs or the bend in the spine. Anyways, here's my rough blocking pass. I think it was pulled off rather well after a long late night of working on it.

Hey what's up minimal readership? I'm finally done with my first animation for my second class. But first, I'll rewind a bit. My new mentor for this class is Martin Hopkins. He is trained in classical animation from Sheridan College and has transitioned into 3D, with his entire professional career pretty much at Dreamworks Animation for the last 13 or so years. He is currently working on Shrek 4, which he claims isn't as bad as you would think and is better than Shrek 3; which I haven't seen. So far he has been pretty great. He sometimes gets out of his chair and acts out something on the camera for you to see instead of just relying on drawing over our frames. His inputs have gotten me from my initial blocking pass up to the polish of the final (although he hasn't seen that yet). Anyways, here is my progress from blocking to final: You might also find this pretty interesting. After we set some keyframes, this is what we use to refine and polish our animations. ...

An Update!!! It's been a while, and decided that I should post something on here. I was going to do a post a couple of weeks back, and upload most of my assignments, but decided to hold off a bit. Now that our first class is done (yay!), we had to create a progress reel of all the final assignments, so I figured I would save myself the trouble of uploading everything individually, and just post that video. Not the greatest work on the planet, but hey, it's only been 12 weeks. I've learned a lot from my first mentor, Jon Collins (of Pixar), and I have enjoyed his critiques. He is very honest with your work, and doesn't sugar coat things which I appreciate. After all, that is what you have to learn to take in order to work professionally. That being said, I've got the next couple of weeks off and start back up with Class 2 (Psychology of Body Mechanics) the first week of January. Should be a pretty big step forward in our curriculum and I can't wait to start learn...

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

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 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...

It is the eve of my Animation Mentor beginning, and I did a few more sketches today. I realized I hadn't practiced in a while and decided that I should get some of that in today. Seeing as I have another life drawing class tomorrow, as well as starting out in AM, it was as good a time as any to draw. I suppose I get some inspiration from my cousin's kids. I drew a couple portraits (kinda crappy ones) back a while ago, probably 3 years, maybe 4. Either way, 1 of the 3 kids was not born yet, and she happens to be the subject of most of my drawings today. I'm not nearly fast enough yet to do some real world action sketches, so these are just some random pictures we took last week at a birthday party. You might notice that there are no faces on them. I need to learn how to do faces in this style before I try or else they'll just look stupid. For some reason I can only do faces when I do them all realistic and rendered. I can't sketch a face for crap. Weird huh?

My Animation Mentor experience is staring to gear up! I've now created my username/password for the campus, and got to watch a whole bunch of introductory videos. Most of the stuff is pretty easy to figure out on your own, but there are a few helpful tips here and there. I've also set up my profile now too, although we haven't been given access to be able to see other people yet. So I guess this is more just like getting my profile ready for when class is ready. Anyways, I've also added my Animation Mentor Student badge over in the right. Look at it all nice and shiny :) I was going to put a fan one up earlier, but I figured I'd just wait until I was able to get my student badge to put up. Good times.

I doubt that many people actually read my blog in the first place, so I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't get linked here from my old location on wordpress. I had some customization issues on wordpress, and you know what, I don't feel like paying to do custom stuff I should be able to do for free. So I ended up here. Within 20 minutes I got the page to look more or less how I want it to (well, I'm gonna tweak it some more when I get home later), and I can fit my custom drawn logo on it! None of the stupid wordpress free layouts had a big enough banner area for it to fit, nor did it let me tweak the CSS code to make it fit. Bastards. Anyways, I hope from this point on in, the blog flows smoothly. I plan on keeping it up throughout my time in Animation Mentor and hopefully after as well. Peace.

About to get to bed because I have to wake up early. I need to wake up bright and early, and get my ass to the LA Convention center before 8:30am to attend CG Con. I've never been before (obviously), and I'm really looking forward to it. I signed up to take some digital animation classes taught by some industry animators, most of which are also mentor's at Animation Mentor :) Hopefully I'll get the chance to talk to at least one of them and ask them about the program. As far as I can tell, it is pretty highly thought of among the industry. Some still are in the view that you need a traditional art college education for it, while others praise the concentration on only character animation and love the results they produce. Anyways, should be going now. Need my sleep!

There I go again, ignoring the blog for a couple of weeks. Don't worry I have a good excuse though! Ok maybe it's not that good. So what happened was that I went and saw "Up" in 3D the day it opened in theaters. I was pretty blown away by the movie and was meaning to blog about it. But then I got lazy, and decided that I would do it after I saw the movie during the next weekend with my friend. We ended up not seeing it until today though, so now I'm finally here. Unfortunately I don't actually have that much to say about the movie. I've never written a review before, and there are tons more out there to read, so on the off chance you haven't seen the movie yet (if you haven't, go NOW), or read a review, I'll just say this. Brilliant. Pixar movies always seem to improve upon themselves on multiple viewings. At least for me anyways. You get a chance for your eyes to wander the screen a bit more, and you often find some deeper meanings in the stor...