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.