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