Posts Tagged ‘animation mentor’

Class 6, Week 2 – Improvements

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

Got my week 2 eCritique back last night, and I have to say, my mentor, Jason Taylor, gives awesome feedback. He had a bunch of ideas for things I could try out in order to improve my shot, and he has a geat way of explaining things.

Anyway, here is the assignment I delivered last week:

I spendt most of my time last week trying to improve the body mechanics of the shot, and to get rid of large amounts of twinning. So I haven’t gotten around to doing large amounts of actual polish yet, but I will get to that as soon as I have gone through and fixed all of the notes that Jason had.

So my job for this week is to make sure the devil character hits all his acting beats. For example adding a small change in the pose when he says “releasing me…”. Do some more acting with his head, don’t just have him looking forward to whole time, break it up a little.

The part where he brings his arms behind his back is a bit stiff. Have him lean forward, and then straighten up. Generally make the body mechanics even better is what I guess is what I’m trying to say, and thanks to Jason I have a pretty good idea of what needs to be done.

Over all I’m very excited about working on this shot again, which is strange because at the end of class 5 I was not happy with it at all, and I was completely stuck. But now I’m really looking forward to working on it some more.

Starting Class 6

Monday, March 29th, 2010

So Animation Mentor is back up, and I have officially started my final class. Class 6. The end. It’s almost scary to think that in about three months I have no idea what will happen or what I’m gonna do.

My mentor this term is a dude called Jason Taylor. Never had him as a mentor before, but he has worked on some great stuff like Ice Age 3, so I’m really looking forward to meeting him and watching his critiques.

So class 6 means we’re gonna go through all our old shots and cleaning them up, re-blocking some stuff and making them look better. And thank god for that. My old shots really needs a lot of cleaning up, and I’m really looking forward to getting started.

My plans for this term is to do as much work as I possibly can, and in the end I will hopefully end up with a demo reel that can get me some work. That is the goal. Hopefully that is something I can achive. All though I’m part of a project that might eat up some of that time (which I’ll talk about once I get around to writing the blog post), so I’ll probably end up doing 18 hour days for the next three months.

And that’s about it. Good luck to everyone that has just started at AM, welcome back to all you guys in classes 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6, and congratulations to the alumni people!

End of Class 5 and Some Other Stuff

Sunday, March 21st, 2010

So week 11 of class 5 at Animation Mentor is now over. We still have week 12 left, so we’re not technically done, but there is no work that needs to be done that week, so I consider it done. It’s been a great term thanks to our fantastic mentor Mario Pochat. Personally I didn’t do anywhere near as good of a job as I could have, and should have, and that is something I definitely have to make up for in class 6 which is right around the corner now.

So I’m really not sure if I’ll bother with uploading my final assignment to my blog as I really don’t think it turned out well at all. Actually, that putting it nicely, it looks like crap. And seeing as class 6 at AM consists of cleaning up all of the old shots that we have done, I would much more like to show it on the blog once I’ve gone through it again, and actually made it look relatively good. Because it is a really funny dialogue piece to animate to, but I just couldn’t get the preformance to work, and I just need a second look at it. Maybe I’ll upload it, maybe I won’t. I’ll think about it.

Anyway! I am also planning on re-designing my blog now in my brief time away from AM. Been thinking about it for some time now, because, frankly, I’m bored to death with the current design and I need something new to look at. In addition to that I have what you might call a mini announcement to make that I’m very excited about. But for reasons I can’t explain I don’t want to talk about it before the new design is up, hopefully some time next week.

Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going fire up Photoshop and play around a little and see what happens. And for some reason, after having watched (and re-watched) way to many episodes of The Kevin Pollak Chat Show recently, I have a strange urge to watch The Usual Suspects again. A movie I literally haven’t seen in years, so I’ll probably put that in the DVD-player later.

So, there you go. I really hope anything I wrote here made sense.

Class 5 – Week 8, Blocking-Plus

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

We are getting dangerously close to the end of Class 5 at Animation Mentor, only three weeks of work left actually, and I still have a ton of stuff to do on my current assignment, which basically means that this is gonna be a rough week. Last week I managed to improve my shot quite a bit. I was hoping I would be able to start splining it to, but sadly I didn’t, so I’m going to have to do a ton of splining this week.

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Class 5 – Week 7, Blocking

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

So, yeah, I know I’ve been horrible when it comes to uploading my Animation Mentor work these last few weeks, but now I finally got around to doing it. I was supposed to have this uploaded yesterday, but apparantly Flickr didn’t like me very much, and I couldn’t upload my shot before today (something about a codec that I have always used not working anymore, I have no idea why). Anyway, my two person dialogue shot is almost blocked out completely. All I need is comfirmation from my mentor that everything works.

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