Week 5 - Squash&Stretch it!

Hey folks, week 5 is over and I have to say, this week was a lot of fun! The lecture was about the principles of Anticipation, where Squash and Stretch were widely explored. It was interesting to watch as always, there was a part when Shawn Kelly showed us a "no anticipation land", to explain how vital is anticipation, even if you're animating "realistically" - anticipation is everywhere, no matter how small it is!
To demonstrate we mastered the notions learned, we had to animate our old friend Bouncing Ball (spoiler: it's the last time!) going through an obstacle course! With the frame limit just at 120, we had to come up something cool, using (and editing) one of 11 possible scenarios provided by AM. My choice was to edit my own, resulting in this:


First Part is with motion blur, disallowed for the "official" assignment, and the second one is without, therefore, the official one.

And, STU is back to get Posed big time! This week's emotion was Devastation. I made a tad exaggerated theatrical one - and also, to show the actor's true feelings, I killed his pet squirrel on stage. Sadly, I've discovered that I'll need that squirrel for one of my future assignments. Bummer.

And the weekly bonus:
This Sunday I went to "Festival Internacional de Banda Desenhada 2011" (www.amadoradb.com), which is pretty much the Portuguese version of Comic-Con, and I've met Filipe Andrade in person! Filipe is an award-winning illustrator who's working for Marvel, in America. We've just spoken briefly online before, and it was so cool to chat with him - he sketched this while we were speaking!

You can find his blog on the "cool people" tab, on the left side menu of my blog. Check it out!
That is all, see you next week!

Week 4 - Dealing with weights

That's it, 1 month of Animation Mentor as already passed by! I feel like these next 17 months will pass FAST.
So this week was all about Timing and Spacing, which combined are one of the Principle of Animation. We were taught on how to use it depending on other factors such as Weight, Inertia, Momentum, Gravity, Acceleration and Deceleration. Keys, Inbetweens, Slow-in and Slow-out, among others, were concepts also successfully brain-washed into our brains! So bottom line, we had to learn all this to animate this amazingly complicated, creative and awesome scene, full of emotional breakdowns and story twists: The 5-second 2 Ball bounce. Our assignment was to use time and spacing in order to show the difference of weights on two balls, through animation. You're right, I lied about the scene, but it was still pretty interesting to do!
This week I followed my mentor's wise advice and I did my planning BEFORE i actually animated the scene! Here it is:

I know, it looks awesome, with different color pencils and all! From this, I've animated and re-animated and counter-animated and angry-animated my scene several times - I'm sorry, I've lied again. I'm never sad or angry when I animate) - and with the help of my awesome peer buddy, my cool class-mates and this campus mentor dude who casually dropped by, improved it until I got my final result:



And there was no pose this week :( Next week though we can canalize all our positive energies on sketching and posing the pose of DEVASTATION, so look forward to that please!

Ciao!

Week 3 - Excited about Bouncing Balls

And week 3 it's coming to the end! Two hours before the deadline and everything is ready to go.
This week there were two different assignments:
For the first one, like last week, we had to sketch some simplified pose drawings and then use the pose on STU in Maya. Only difference this week was that we had to give a feeling of excitement to the pose. Here are my sketches and the final pose:

The second part of the assignment was to animate (yes!) a simple bouncing ball on Maya, based on how a basketball or football would do it - we had to search/film some video reference. This is how mine turned out, I'm quite happy with the final result even tho I wasn't very creative on this one! I was trying to learn the basic stuff so I can innovate in the next bouncing assignments!



And great news, everyone! I've an awesome Peer Buddy (peer buddy is someone who is more advanced in AM than you and is your own student-mentor!). She's from the UK, I present to you Tegan Jephcott! here's her blog

And here's the bonus printscreen of this week's Q&A with Chad! (pay attention to the chat box).

Ciao!

Week 2 - First real assignment, posing STU!

And here I am for week 2 update. This week I'm finishing early (Friday) as I won't have any free time this weekend, as my girlfriend's family are now doing a 10 hour long car trip to visit me in Lisbon, from Spain!
About the assignment now, we were required to go outside to a public place and start drawing people in a simplified way, the only thing that matters here was the "pose", and not the drawing skills or detail on the sketches. I did some tries and it was awful at first. Then I read Wayne Gilbert's "Simplified Drawing for Planning Animation" (http://anamie.com/anamie_book.html) and it all became easier. I also got some inspiration from comics and draw some cool poses. Here they are:

Posing STU was more complicated than I expected, I've done loads of options and 2 different poses. In the end I preferred the Shovel pose from a sideways point of view, mainly because the silhouette. Here they are:

To end this week's post, I'd like to thank to all the people who gave me feedback, they've made my work much easier. People from AM are incredibly helpful and cool! Here's a picture from our Q&A: