Frame by Frame

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...

Dropped by Fenton's today to check out the launch party for "Up" on blu-ray and dvd. I got to meet Ricky Nierva, the production designer. I'd listened to his splinecast a few times, so it was cool to meet him. He knows my mentor Jon Collins, and said AM was an awesome program and to keep at it. Anyways, to round it off, I got a nice drawing of Carl and his signature.

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.