AM week 202

So here we go with the first blocking of my jump animation!
Right now there are just two dark planes as a ground, which will hopefully be replaced by two modeled mountain tops, depending on how much time I'll have.

For those of you who are not into animation, the term "blocking" basically means "roughing out" the movement, so that all the key elements and positions are there, and you know exactly what's going on. So right now there are still images missing in between the poses and the character snaps from one position to the next. The next step will be to fill in more information and refine the movement further.



As a side note, I recently watched the documentary on the "Wall-E" Blu-Ray called "The Pixar Story", which is a 90 minute film about the history of the studio, created by director Leslie Iwerks. It's just awesome, I totally enjoyed it and found it to be very inspiring and motivating :)
So go check it out, I think it can also be found on the 2-disc DVD set.

Moreover, the documentary is shown in beautiful HD, and better still, all the sample scenes from other Pixar films that are featured in the movie also look like HD to me. This makes me super-excited about the upcoming high-def releases of their films!

So much for now.....

New Toy

Now for something less related to animation: I have a new toy :)

Since Spring is approaching and I don't want to be working inside all the time, I decided I need a mobile device. However I didn't want to get a big and expensive laptop, but rather something I can type on in the park, surf the web and watch movies on a train-ride.

So I decided on a little 10inch eeePC netbook from Asus, the newly released 1000HE. So far I'm really happy with it, it comes with Windows XP and after installing some of my favourite tools and upgrading to 2 Gigs of RAM it works perfectly for my needs.

It has a lot of convenient features such as deactivating w-lan and bluetooth with the click of a button, or different power saving modes. It also has a multi-touch trackpad and a matte screen. Probably the best thing about it is that the batterie lasts for up to 10 hours, I guess for typical use it's between 7 and 9 hours.

Now I could have my AM Q&A-sessions in the park :)

Ok, just thought I'd share some "nerd stuff"...

Happy Easter everbody!!

Class 2 started!

Hellooo!

Since I promised to post a little more regularly, I wanted to write a little bit about my new class and Mentor, because last week Class 2 of the Animation Mentor program started! Yeah :)
This term I'll be dealing with body mechanics, and towards the end of the semester we'll move on to full-body shots with arms and legs. For the start of the term the motto is still "Keep it simple", and we animate the ball with feet.

Last week we had our first Q&A with the new class. My Mentor for this term is Josh Book, who is currently working at Wildbrain Animation Studios in San Francisco. He also worked for studios like Nickelodeon and Electronic Arts and originally started out in game animation. So he has a variety of experience in many different areas and styles of animation, which is awesome!
For more info check out his website!

The assignment I chose for the first month of Class 2 (yeah we get to choose now!) is a jump over a gap between two mountain tops. We were supposed to shoot some video reference and then do the planning for the shot.

So here is my planning :)
If it's too small just open it in a new window...

AM week 112 - Final Week of Class 1

Hey guys!

Here we are in the final week of the first term. I can't believe how quickly this has gone by.
I had an amazing time and wanted to mention my awesome classmates, who were always there to help and give critique, which is so important. Thanks to all of you and the best of luck! Although I don't mention names because of privacy, you guys know who you are ;)

Of course I want to say "Thaaaaanks" to my Mentor Mario Pochat as well, I think he did a great job and was super-motivated. The Q&A's were always fun and the critiques extensive and very helpful. So the students who get to be in his class this semester can count themselves lucky :)
Keep on rockin' Mario!

By the way, Mario is also a founder of "Vancouver Animation", a website focused on the animation business around the city of Vancouver, Canada. It has forums, news, a job-board and information about companies in the area.


This week we didn't have to do an assignment, except for assembling all of our animations into a so-called "Progress Reel", which shows our progress throughout the term.

So here you go, enjoy and leave some comments!



That's all for Class 1, sorry again for posting all this stuff so late! I hope I can do better in Class 2, after all this is fun :)

Take care everybody!
See you around...

AM week 111

Week 111 was tough for me, because I worked on a freelance job doing previz for a live-action film, which took several full days. Moreover I started teaching at the macromedia FH in Munich, which I also had to prepare for...

In the end I could only work about 2 days on my AM assignments, which was not really enough to make the walk shine... I was happy that I brought the blocking pretty far the week before, with almost everything keyed on every second frame (on 2's for the animators out there, hehe). That saved my butt because I didn't have too much work cleaning up the motion, because most of it was pretty well defined.
The hip rotations and the legs still needed a lot of fine-tuning though.

So here's the final result of my "Personality Walk":



I also included Front- and Side-Views for clarity.

Sketches and pose for week 111 were about "Balance"


3D-Pose


Looking at it now I find the pose pretty boring, but again, I wanted to go for something more "standard" because I didn't have much time for experimentation...

AM Week 110 - Personality!

This was one of the assignments I was looking forward to a lot. The "Personality Walk"! Unfortunately I didn't have a lot of time to work on it because I had to prepare for two jobs that were starting the following week. While I generally try to keep commercial work to a minimum to maximize my time for AM, I have to work sometimes ;)

So here is the blocking for my "happy, double-bounce-leg-kick-walk".

I shot video-reference of myself from side and front views, then converted that to 24 frames/s and used it as a guide. In the actual animation I tried to exaggerate certain parts of the movement, like the up&down and the kick.

Tell me what you think!



The pose for week 10 was supposed to communicate "Exhaustion".

Sketches

3D-Pose

AM week 109 - Finishing the Walk

This week we were supposed to bring the walk from blocking to final, adding details and smoothing out the motion. One of the trickiest areas that took a lot of work was the "popping" of the knees, a result of IK-legs. I think the result works quite alright :)

The pose for week 109 was meant to show "Concern".



Sketches


3D-Pose


Revision of "Strength" Pose