Class 2, Week 4 - Bye Backflip, Hello Wind Run!

Greetings! That's right, I finished early this week.
I'm proud to say that I'm happy with the final result of my backflip! I made a little nice render, and everything is looking better. Everyday I would change pretty small things - polishing - taking the advice of very helpful friends! A particular moment made my week: Bobby "BOOM" Beck, the head and founder of Animation Mentor, a true animation legend, complimented my shot! I quote him

"Overall ROCK SOLID AWESOME. GREAT job breaking things up. WOW, excellent execution!"

I had an instant Nerdasm! Regardless to say what these words meant to me. I feel really motivated to keep giving my best and pushing myself. Here is the very final version of the shot:


And, for this week, we have a new challenge! We have to plan a mew shot, chosen from a picklist made by AM. I picked "Wind Run" (fast run and quickly change directions). And I will be FUN this time! Hope the drawings speak for themselves, because I'm not feeling particularly poetic right now! Here they are:

And, to finalize, I remind you that the Oscars for best Animation Film is coming! Which one is your favorite? Rango all the way for me!

Class 2, Week 3 - Splinning the backflip

Hey everyone! I'm back for this week's blog post :)
This week we were supposed to take our blocking shot and continue working on it, as far as we could. I managed to get out of the blocking phase and took it too splined mode - meaning that every frame is different now. I changed a lot of areas as you'll notice, and it's looking much more dynamic! Here's the result:



As for the weekly bonus for this week, I'd like to announce and congratulate the awesome success of one of my upper class mates, Alyssa Lee, who just got a job at Dreamworks! Although it's an entry level for now, I'm pretty sure she will rock the house and make her way up in the company! Go girl! ;) I hope to fly as high someday! She has a blog too: http://www.doublealee.com/blog/

Class 2, Week 2 - Blocking to Final

Olá amigos! After the long break between term 1 and 2, I was really scared of opening Maya! Mostly because I was afraid of my computer exploding or imploding, as I had some really annoying problems with it during the break. But it seems that his bad days are gone, everything went smooth!
So. This week I had to make all my key-poses and important in-betweens from my planning. So it's normal that parts of the animation you're about to see (who am I fooling, everyone just watches the video first, I'm even lucky if you're reading this!) will feel a bit... not well animated. That's because of the 24 pictures that make a second of film, maybe less than half are done! The most important are, and with them you're supposed to understand the action. Here it is:


Hopefully next week everything will be looking better! For this week's weekly bonus, I give you an animated success of the internet, the asdf movies! Really simple animation, stupid ideas, great humor! Why have a story, right? here they go! Enjoy!

Class 2, Week 1 - Walk-Through: Clarity in Blocking

It's sooo good to be back on AM! Loads of new people, I see myself in some of them, the old me, a long time ago... Actually it's just 3 months, but just being in AM it's such a big deal for me that it's an important change on my life. This week I'm going to write on everyone's workspace a text with some tips, from my own experience. Hope they like it!
Anyway, back to the blog owner's work. This week we had to choose a main action for our shot from a picklist. My choice was "backflip". My mentor David Tart told us in the Q&A to keep the shot really simple, so we can concentrate in the animation. So here's my "simple planning":

And here's my video reference:


Now let's see how it goes, hope that in 3 weeks time I'll have a cool animation!
Ciao!

Oh, I almost forgot, here's the weekly bonus. Did you know that Pixar uses the same yellow van in every single movie? Check it out! Pixar's Yellow Van

Class 2 has started!!!

Finally, Animation Mentor is back! This roughly two week stop was insane, I would wake up everyday without knowing what to do. Christmas, New Year's Eve and my lovely girlfriend's visit helped to pass the time tho, and now here we are! There were a couple of reasons that led me to look forward for this to start: meeting my new mentor, my new class, and see some people that I know starting on Class 1. I wish them luck - Edgar and Sergio Martins, the Portuguese twins of awesomeness, and Dan Raigorodsky, the awesome Spanish friend! None of them are in Chad Stewart's class, shame on that, hope I'll be the peer buddy of one of them :)
So, let's get it on with the news. My mentor is David Tart. You probably don't recognize him but you've seen it several times in the big screen - on the credits of Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc, Bug's Life, For the Birds, Robots and others. Pretty impressive right?? Here's his showreel:



And I chuckled when I saw my class - 7 out of the 15 (including me) are in my class again! They are: Gurleen, Miren, Siggi, Sue, Tom and Vikram (and me). And we have some yankees now too! The rest of the class is: Irina Wolf (GER), Jocelyn Dombroski (USA), Joelle Saveliev (USA), Justin Hwang (USA), Michelle Green (USA), Nathan Lovato (FRA), Samantha Watha (USA), Timothy Griffith (USA). And no map this week, aww :(

See you next week with some work done!