Animation Mentor - Class 4 - Week 6

Wow!!! My experience so far this term has been awesome!!! I'm learning so much from my mentor, Brett Coderre. He really knows his stuff. And the lectures from this term are trully inspiring. Victor Navone's walk through a shot was specially eye opening since he took us through the creation of a shot all the way from blocking to polish and what's incredible is that it only took him about 10 hours!!! That is trully amazing. The lecture was split up into two 2.5 hour lectures. This has been the best lecture so far I think.

So, there is a lot to fill you in on. Done a lot of work this term. By week 3 we were supposed to be done with our dialogue shot from last term. We had to add the facial animation. I'm still not done with it... it needs a lot of polish and some pose changes but here is what I had to turn in.



Then we started to work on our next assignment. A 2 character, multi-shot, dialogue assignment. Wow, talk about a lot of work. This is our last assignment and we need to complete it by week 12. This is going to be very challenging since it is a lot of work so I picked a shot of relatively short length and I'm not planning to have as much complicated acting. It's a line from the movie School of Rock with Jack Black. :-) Here is my work so far... only 4 weeks left... ish!

Video Reference
Blocking in Stepped Mode

And here is my blocking as it stands now in Splined Mode.



And one of the other assignments we have every week is to do facial poses. This helps us develop techniques in character facial animation for acting and dialogue. Each week we must pick 2 interesting face pictures and create a 3D representation, simplifying and exagerating certain aspects. Here are the ones I've done so far.

Week 402 - Pose 1
Week 402 - Pose 2
Week 405 - Pose 1
Week 405 - Pose 2
Week 406 - Pose 1
Week 406 - Pose 2
Week 407 - Pose 1
Week 407 - Pose 2

OK, that's all for now. I will post again as soon as I have other big news or some big breakthrough in my work. :-) Feel free to leave me a message about my work or if you have any feedback.

Kenny

Check out the Animation Mentor Reel for Summer 2006

It's been a while since my last post so I'm posting a few things today.

In case you're interested in seeing what other students have bee doing at AM, here is the Animation Mentor Reel for Summer 2006. Maybe in the next reel you might see my bee animation :-). I wasn't done when the 2006 reel was created so I wasn't able to submit it then. Well, that's if I'm lucky... the student work is amazing!

My Animation Reel So Far and New Mentor!

Hey everybody. Doing an update on my animation reel again. This time I really had fun adding some sound effects to my bee animation and the rest of my work. Let me know what you think of it.



It's so exciting... this week we start Class 4, Advanced Acting and my mentor is Brett Coderre from Pixar!

This is from his profile in AM: Brett has been working with Pixar Animation Studios since A Bugs Life. He is currently working on Pixars 2006 movie CARS. Brett won The Visual Effects Society Award for Outstanding Character Animation with his fantastic work on Finding Nemo, for the Dory Whale speaking scenes.

So in the next 3 weeks I will be adding facial animation to my Mocking Bird animation.

Kenny

Animation Mentor - Class 3 - Week 12

Wow, finally working with a full character with facial animation and actual skin. This is the first time I work with Bishop, Animation Mentor's full biped character.

This last shot I've been working on has been grewling but I am satisfied with the results... although I still feel like the poses could be much stronger. But at least I feel like the body mechanics are working well.

For this shot we had to pick a sound clip from a movie and use it as the dialog for a one character shot. After going through several clips and reference I narrowed it down to one. Check out some of my reference and sample clips.

Sample Clips
Sample Reference

The clip I ended up choosing was the Mocking Bird clip, which originally I didn't even act out. The planning is always the hardest for me. So I acted it out gathered reference.

Reference

Then I went through all the phases as with the previous animation... except that this time we were also putting in acting choices and body expressions. And in our lectures we also learned about how the eyes move and how the hands should be animated. The lectures were amazing. So here is my progression:

Blocking
Blocking Plus
Refining

And the polished shot I finished this week is here:



There is a lot more I could still fix on this shot, however we have limited time and I expect there to be some changes when I get my new mentor next class.

Now when we get into class 4 we will work on all the facial animation for the first 3 weeks and finish the shot. I can't wait. This is going to be sooo much fun.

Ken

Animation Mentor - Class 3 Week 6

Class 3 has been so much fun. We are being introduced to acting! My mentor is Tim Allen and he is amazing. He has more than 27 years of experience and has worked on tons of animated features including Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Pocahontas and Home on the Range.

He has been great at getting me to work on my spacing in my animation as will be evident in this first shot I did. We had to do a shot that had an emotion change in it... happy to sad, mad to embarrassed, etc. But we had to do it using the character Stewie, which has no facial expressions. So the emotion has to be evident from the body posture and the acting choices.

Here is the reference I took for the animation I decided to do:
Bee Reference

Here is the planning I did for it:
Bee Planning

This is my:
Blocking
Blocking Plus
Polishing

And the final:


This was a great learning experience... and I loved getting into the polishing at the end and seeing the animation just come alive as I did all the polishing updates.

Let me know what you guys think of this one.

Kenny

My Animation Reel So Far

So I just thought I would share my animation reel so far. This is all my work from class 1 and 2 in Animation Mentor.



I have to put some music in the background... :-)

Kenny

Animation Mentor - Class 2 Week 12

Wow... it's been a while since I posted... and I feel bad that I haven't kept everybody informed.

I finalized my previous pole jumping assignment and this is how it turned out... I still have to make some improvements but I added a picture of the Grand Canyon in the background to give it some depth.



The final assignment of class 2 was a pick assignment. This time with full Stewie with arms. We had to pick between having him dive of a diving board, do a baseball pitch, walk a ballance beam, open a sticky door, or do a heavy push or pull.

These are the 2 ideas I pitched to my mentor:
Push and Dive Reference

I decided to go with a heavy push since in 3D it is really challenging to show weight. And for my animation I decided to push a couch in a short 15 second animation. I would have loved to have done the dive though... it looked like so much fun.

So here is the first pass of blocking:
First Blocking Pass

And here is the final push rendered:


This was a great term although I was incredibly busy... I did learn a lot about animation though... this is so exciting.

Animation Mentor - Class 2 - Week 6

This week we had to do a second round of blocking. I went ahead and started smoothing my animation. Working with a more complex character is hard. This Stewie has no arms but it was a lot of work to get this smoothed. The second half of the animation is still looking a little floaty.

Second Round of Blocking

Animation Mentor - Class 2 - Week 5

This week we had to do a pass of blocking of our assignment. As you can guess from my planning, this week's character is Stwie with No Arms. :-)

Here is the first pass at blocking. I kept it too close to the reference and I'm gonna have to push the poses a little bit more.

First Pass of Blocking

Animation Mentor - Class 2 - Week 4

I haven't written for a while... AM and work had me really busy.

The assignment for this week was to polish our kick. So here is the final polished rendered kick.



In addition we also had to have a final video reference done for my pole jumping assignment. I edited a couple of my shots together to get this clip.



I also created an animatic for this class as well out of my thumbnails. This one came out to be super wide... so here it is as a link.

Pole Jumping Animatic

Filmed some more reference video yesterday...

OK, so I got a lot of feedback and went back out there yesterday. I'm so out of shape. So here is the reference I got.

More Video Reference

And look at what I found on my way home from work!!!! :-)

My Hoboken Neighbor

Reference Video Footage for week 4's Assignment

OK, I feel like a crazy man! haha I was on my way to the ferry yesterday and missed it and since I had half an hour to kill and found an empty construction site with some nice poles to jump on I decided to shoot some reference video footage for my animation. It was really funny because it was rush hour and all the people walking by kept on staring at me... They must have been thinking, "What is that crazy guy doing???" haha... Check it out:

Pole Jumping Video Reference

The bad thing is that there are some things I don't like about this ref so I will probably be filming again today... oh well...

Animation Mentor Assignment - Class 2 - Week 3

This week was awesome! Learned all about advanced overlapping action in the human body. Overlapping happens in the
1) spinal column and head
2) shoulders, elbows, wrist and fingers
3) and in the hips, knees, ankles and toes

The lecture was very instructive. We saw several overlapping examples that we analyzed, such as a bull rider, a wakeboarder, a soccer player. We studied concepts such as reversals, the wave principle, breaking down reference, and putting all the concepts together into a shot.

In addition the second part of the lecture also covered advanced anticipation. One of the main points I took from this part of the lecture is that animation is all about communication with your viewers and one of the best ways of doing this is with anticipation... it is the lifeline of communication with your audience. We also learned about when to use it and when not to use it.

Our assignment was to start polishing our kick. Here is the kick in a more polished form. I should have it finished by next week end. Then we will start with a full body character, Stewie. :-)

Blocking Plus Kick

My First Video Blog!

They added a new tab to the AM website and we are now able to post video journals! I made this one for this week. :-)

Animation Mentor Assignment - Class 2 - Week 2

Wow, after all that work I got to my critique this week and my mentor suggested doing something a little less complicated... so I went out and shot some new reference video footage. Check it out:

Reference for Kick

I also had to do the first round of blocking this week so here is my first attempt:

Kick Blocking Pass

Animatic for the Turn and Kick Planning

I had a lot of fun doing the planning for this project. I did this little animatic for fun based on my thumbnails. It is not perfect of course because I was not planning on animating my sketches, so the feet and ball and body don't match perfectly, but at least you can get a feel for the timing.



Pretty cool huh!? :-)

Animation Mentor Assignment - Class 2 - Week 1

This week was really cool. We are starting with a pick assignment and had to choose between a side step, half turn or kick. I really like the kick idea so I decided to do some nice soccer juggling... and since I suck at soccer I looked up some nice reference on the BBC Motion Gallery online. This is what I'm using as my reference.



Then, based on the reference, we need to do some really good planning of all the key poses of the animation. Good planning helps a lot when it comes to blocking your animation in the computer. So for the first week we have not even touched Maya to start animating. It's all been pencil and paper.

Here is my planning so you can see how the reference was transfered to paper.



I'll be posting my blocking next week. :-)

And my new mentor iiiiis...

Just started Class 2 in Animation Mentor! How exciting! This term we will be studying Body Mechanics so we will be doing animations that show weigh, pushing, pulling, jumping, kicking, etc. How exciting!

We were also assigned new mentors. My new mentor is Raquel Coelho and she is from Brazil originally. She has lots of experience and has worked at companies such as Blue Sky, PDI/Dreamworks, Wildbrain and Laika Entertainment. She currently works at Tippet Studios.

I can't wait to start animating! :-)

Animation Mentor Assignment - Class 1 - Week 12

OMG, it's hard to believe we are at the end of class one. This program has been a blast so far. Very time intensive but I've learned a lot. For this last week we compiled all of the work so far into one long video. Plus, I was able to pick Amber's brain a couple of times to get some last tips on my cartoony walk. So here is my work for Animation Mentor, Level 1, Basic Foundations.

Animation Mentor Assignment - Class 1 - Week 11

Sorry I'm posting this a little late. For week 11 we worked on polishing one of our walks and rendering them in perspective view. I chose the cartoony walk from last week.



In the lecture we covered some of the most important aspects of animation we've covered so far... at least with biped characters. It was all about hips, hip angle, and common mistakes. And our focus was on balance and and shifting of weight. Therefore for this week's pose we sketched and then posed some ballance poses.

Animation Mentor Assignment - Class 1 - Week 10

Almost done with this term. Next week is our last week. Wow, this term has really flown by.

So I decided to do the first cartoon walk that I did for reference. But as I started working with it I realized that the motion in the reference really wasn't enough. I really had to push it to make it special, added a little exaggeration. So here is the walk with some changes. And I really would like to make a couple of other changes to it but I ran out of time. Well, hopefully Amber will like it. This time I was able to go in and smooth the knees and the walk in general so I am happy with the results.



We also had to work on a pose that demonstrated exhaustion, kind of how I feel today... I didn't get much sleep last night. Here is my pose, please tell me what you think.



Oh and on a happy note, last week Amber really liked my work. Both my pose and my walk cycle. She had minor corrections in each so I'm really pleased. And the funny thing is I was thinking I was way off since I hadn't finished polishing. ;-)

Possible Walks for this Week

This week we are working on a personality walk.

Please look at the following reference video clips and let me know what you think. I would like to know which ones you like most and if you think the timing works or I should act it out differently.

Cartoon Walk 1


Cartoon Walk 2


Drunk Walk


Injured Walk


Sad and Tired Walk


Feedback welcome...

My Buddies and Skype

The cool thing about this week is that me and some of my classmates started useing Skype to communicate. It works great because a group of us can have conversations (we have currently tested with up to 5 at a time) and give feedback and critiques as we work. Our sessions have been very productive and we are getting to know each other better and better every day. These are my buddies with their respective AM avatars.

Robert Barros Jamie Quist Nathan Jent Peer Lemmers

Animation Mentor Assignment - Class 1 - Week 9

This week we learned all about exaggeration in our lecture. We learned that we can take our animation to the next level by adding exaggeration. This makes our work look interesting and not booooring. We can always use exaggeration to punch up the scene and call attention to what is important for the viewer to focus on. But, it is important not to overuse exaggeration because it can confuse or turn off the audience.

We specifically learned about exaggerating Poses, exaggerating Timing and exaggerating Weight. We also touched up a little bit on the exaggeration of Ideas and Personality.

For our assignment we worked on smoothing out the Vanilla walk and I have to say, it was more work than I expected. Here are the 2 versions that I submitted. The second one has a more realistic passing of the foot and it also has a nicer up and down motion of the body. Unfortunately, I didn't finish polishing the second one, so there is still a little knee popping here and there.



We also had to work on a pose that demonstrated concern. Here is my pose, please tell me what you think.



And finally, my revision of last week's strong pose.



I really wish I had had more time to smooth out my walk. I had several comments during the week that made me change my idea and my key poses. Maybe for next week's revision I will have it all smoothed out.

So, next week is our personality walk!!! I can't wait! It's going to be so much fun!

Funny thing happened this week...

OMG, it's so funny what happened this week. I was seeing The Making of Finding Nemo DVD last weekend. Melissa got it for me for Valentines and I finally had time to check it out. So I'm looking at it and they start talking about them finally finishing the movie... so they show the animators starting to celebrate and all of a sudden I do a double take... there's BOOM in the middle of the bunch shaking a champagne bottle and spraying everybody!!! (For those of you not in AM, Bobby "BOOM" Beck is the founder of our school and worked at Pixar for a long time before quitting to start Animation Mentor.)

So, I took the opportunity to write Bobby a quick message and ask him it that was him in the DVD... I was just making sure since the footage wasn't that clear... and also express how much I was loving the AM experience. The next day I received a message from Bobby thanking me and asking me if he could use my quote. I said sure... but I had no idea what the quote would be used for... I thought maybe the website.

Then Wednesday I almost fell over when Brian and other friends started calling me and asking if I had seen the Animation Mentor Newsletter. I opened my mail and there I was at the very top, Quote of the Month! So here it is so you guys can check it out.

Animation Mentor Report, March 2006 Issue #10

My Mentor

Just realized that I hadn't told you guys about my mentor.

My mentor is Amber Martorelli and she is awesome. She has worked as a character animator for 7 years. Most recently, she animated for Blue Sky Studios on their feature films, Robots and Ice Age 2. Prior to Blue Sky, she worked at Big Idea Productions on the film Jonah, as well as, a few Veggietale specials. Amber got her start at a small house, Aston Entertainment, working on TV promos and videos during her last two years finishing her animation degree at Ringling School of Art and Design. This is copied almost verbatum from her profile on AM, hehe.

In any case, it is soooo cool to have a mentor that has actually worked in the industry. What is so amazing about AM is that all the mentors have at least 3 to 5 years of experience in the Animation industry. Most of them are actually working at one of the many studios around the country. And you get to meet a lot of them as a student so it is a great opportunity to learn from the best.

In addition, Amber's husband, Lucas, is currently working for Pixar as a lighter! So it was very interesting in one of the live Q&A sessions we had with her to ask her husband all about working at Pixar and how the Disney thing has affected everyone. It's also been really cool because in a few occations Amber has shown us some of the animation techniques with actuall clips from the movies that she worked on, which include Robots and Ice Age 2!

Animation Mentor Assignment - Class 1 - Week 8

OK, so the work this week went great. Our assignment was to block out Ballie in a simple vanilla walk. It was more work than I expected. In addition to the contact, breakdown and extreme poses that I alluded to in the previous post, we also had to work on the latteral side to side movement of the hips, as well as the dropping of the hip of the passing leg. In this animation test you can see the result of all my changes. I will be cleaning up the animation next week so that in week 9's post you will see a smoother animation.



Our other assignment was to pose Stu to communicate that he is strong. Here are my poses for this week. Also, click on the sketches link if you want to see the sketches that I drew to base these poses on. During the week we try to find inspiration for our poses from video, pictures or real life observation.

Strong Sketches



Finally, this week I also fixed all the feedback that my mentor Amber corrected on my bouncing Taylor animation. There were TONS of changes but it looks much better. I know to most of you the animation will look very similar to the original... but I have made several adjustments to anticipation, overlapping action, timing and squash and stretch. Check it out:

Animation Mentor - Class 1 - Week 8

Walking, walking, walking... This week we are doing a walking assignment with our new character, Ballie. We had a big lecture about how to block in a walk, starting with the contact poses (where the forward foot makes contact with the ground), on to the breakdowns (where one foot passes the other), and then adding the extremes, extreme down (as you catch your weight after the contact) and extreme up (the highest point of the walk before the contact). We were also explained how walking is a controlled fall. And that as bipeds what we are doing when we walk is loosing our ballance and falling... until catch ourselves with our forward foot... then doing it all over again. :-) Think about it, if you don't put your foot in front of you when you walk, you would fall flat on your face!

Here is my planning for the animation of the walk.


Here is my first blocking of a walk. As you can see I have only put in the contacts, breakdowns and extremes at frames 0, 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21 and 24. The whole cycle takes 24 frames, or one second.



This week was also pretty tough because I had to go to Dallas for Verizon. But the cool think was that it gave me a chance to do a lot of stuff on the boat, like read the animator's handbook and work on the planning sketch.

I'll be updating later this week with a cleaned up walk cycle... it's going to look smooooooth!

Animation Mentor Assignment - Class 1 - Week 7

This week was the hardest yet. We learned how to set up an animation pose to pose. Bobby explained how to do it with OneLeg, our one legged ball boddied character :-).

As an assignment we had to pick between doing a jump animation of OneLeg or doing an animation of Tailor, our ball with a tail (like a squirrel) jumping a couple of times. Being the overachiever that I am I decided to combine both characters into one animation. I started on it early so I was able to finish a first draft by Wednesday (I practically didn't sleep). I got lots of comments and feedback from lots of classmates, other advanced students and mentors and was able to really work it. Hope you guys like it.



I also worked on the pendulum assignment from last week. Oh... this one was hard. I thought I had done such a good job and after listening to my mentor's comments I realized I had a lot to change. I put the before and after animations so you can see the difference. The changes are mostly in the timing of the swings. There are also spacing changes at the bottom of the swings of the pendulum.

Animation Mentor Assignment - Class 1 - Week 6

This week we had to do an animation displaying the concept of overlapping action. This can be seen in the motion of all living things since nothing in this world moves without it unless we are looking at mechanical motion. Examples of overlapping action can be seen when you see a flat waving in the wind, the grass as it is blown around by the wind, a dog wagging its tail, or as you will be able to see in this animation, a pendulum swinging from side to side.



And here is the revision for last week's work.

Animation Mentor Assignments - Class 1 - Weeks 2-5

These are the assignments I have had so far:

For week 2 we had to go out and sketch people and pose our 3D character Stu based on a pose that we liked. Here are the poses that I chose and the revisions that I did after I received critiques from my mentor:



For week 3 we had to sketch excited poses and then pose Stu based on our favorite poses. We also had to animate a bouncing ball based on correct physics. Here are the poses I chose and the revisions that I did, as well as the revised bouncing ball and the reference footage that I based it on.



For week 4 we had to animate 2 bouncing balls. One that had heavy characteristics and one that was light. Here is how the animation turned out. I added some dynamics for fun as well. Dynamics are physics that can be added to objects within Maya to create special effects. These are realistic but don't have the animation techniques that we are learning in class.



Week 5 has been the most fun so far. We had to animate a ball bouncing through an obstacle course. In this animation we are using the concepts of Squash and Stretch, Anticipation, Timing and Spacing. Squash and Stretch and Anticipation are two of the twelve animation principles developed at Disney. We also had to sketch poses showing a person that was devastated and pose Stu based on our favorites. Here is what I handed in. Still pending revisions. My mentor's crit is this Wednesday.



Let me know what you think about these. Just add a comment to this post.

Kenny

Finally joining Animation Mentor

I've finally started Animation Mentor and I'm loving the classes. It's a little hard to balance with work but I'm managing. I'm meeting a lot of new people and learning lots about animation techniques. The classes are excellent.

My mentor is Amber Martorelli and she has been animating for a while. She worked on Ice Age 2 and Robots while she was at Blue Sky Studios in NY. It's incredible to be learning first hand from so many people that work in the industry and having a mentor with industry experience is a must. Just this week we were having a Q&A in which she showed us scenes from the movies she worked on and was able to answer lots of our questions about how things worked at Blue Sky and what it was like.

And it's so much fun to finally be working in something that I feel so passionate about. It is so interesting to read about animation, and learn about the industry, and animation techniques. How amazing will it be once I'm working at one of these companies. I'm really looking forward to it.

So every now and then I will be posting some of my animations in here so you guys can check them out. Feel free to leave comments about anything you see.

Over and out!

My First Post

I finally started my Blog. I've been meaning to do this for a while but now that I am at Animation Mentor and everybody has one I can't put it off for longer... So, here goes!