Class1 Progress Reel

The video posted below resumes the progress of my work at animation mentor. Hope that you'll enjoy.

1st term finished

How has the program been so far you may ask?
Frankly, I was expecting it to be great, and the fact is that it has really been. It's not that I'm a fan, but this experience has been really mind blowing.

Before Animation Mentor, I was animating in a disorganised manner. Although I'm no professional animator yet, but I see things in a new way. All of those animation principles are getting a lot clearer. Timing, spacing, arcs, overlapping action and other have really become the foundation of every animation. Now when I look at some of my older works I say " gosh! how didn't I see it earlier ? How could I do such a mistake? ... How this and that?...."

There's still a long way to go, I'll work really hard and hopefully one day I'll be able to stand close to some professional animators. For now I'm compiling my class reel that I'll be posting very soon and then will be staying away from my computer and relax a little bit before starting the following class.

Class 110 and 111

The last 2 weeks for this term have been about animating a walk with personality.
After looking at different references I decided to go for a sort of heavy and exhausted walk.
I've really learned a lot (yes I know, this sentence won't stop coming back lol) during this week and for this animation we had to put into practice everything we learned so far.

Exhausted pause

Class 108 & 109

Those two past weeks have been pretty intense. The main assignment was to animate the simplest possible walk for 48 frames. Yes, just that. I tought that was very easy but again there were many surprises waiting for me when I started doing it.
It's been very interesting because it helped me open my animator's eyes a bit more in being able to see subtle details. The simple walk or vanilla walk is supposed to be the kind of walk we see everyday on the streets. No exaggeration, no too much ups and downs, no personality, just a boring walk. I've had many difficulties and after so many hours in front of my computer I couldn't judge what I was doing any more. At the end I had something that I was quite happy to show and I personally thought that it looked great. Wrong!!! My mentor showed me that I still have a load more to learn. I hope that one day I'll be able to read these notes again and laugh about my past mistakes. The video below shows what I had after I submitted my weekly assignment and then reviewed it after receiving my mentor's critique.

Strenght pose

Class 107

This week we've had to use a new character and make it behave like a squirrel, and for that we have to concentrate even more on overlapping actions, timing and arcs.
The pendulum assignment wasn't my greatest piece of work but fortunately this one seems a bit easier so I'll try to catch up!

Week 6 Pendulum Revision

I have to admit that everything is getting harder and harder. Loads of work every week and a full time job are a real challenge to overcome. But.... I will get there!
I've had the video critique from my mentor for this assignment, and the overall message for me was that it was overcomplicated, especially for the second half of the animation. So for this week's advice I'll have to remember to keep things simple.

Class 106 pendulum first pass animation

This week was about understanding overlaping action and the assignement was to animate a pendulum moving around and apply the overlaping on the pendulum joints.

Devastated Stu

Class 105 Final

With this one I really had the opportunity to experiment with spacing. I discovered that one of the key elements to have in a good animation is the diversity in the timing and spacing.
Having an animated object moving to fast or too slow from the beginning to the end will probably make it feel boring. Having some texture in the spacing subconsciously adds a lot of appeal to an animation.
To illustrate all that crazy talk you can have a look at my animation where the ball starts with a slow jump, then accelerates in the roller coaster, decelerates on air and accelerates again when it gets hit by the rotating bar. I can't pretend that this is a perfect animation but I think that it looks much more appealing than the previous video where the ball has a more even spacing.

Class 105 blocking

Here is my obstacle course animation. Still loads to do but not enough time. We were introduced to squash and stretch, and the assignment was to have a ball going through an obstacle course and correctly apply squash and stretch on the ball.

Class 104 final

That's the final version of the assignment

Class 104

Here is my try on this week's assignment and the main principles learned this week were timing and spacing. With those 2 principles correctly applied you can give an impression of weight to an animated object.

Excited Stu

Here's Stu. He's supposed to be very excited. Do you think he is?

Class 103

This third week seemed easy at the beginning but I quickly realised how overconfident I was.
We had to animate a simple basket ball bouncing and coming into rest. What I thought was going to take me a few hours to do ended up keeping me busy for a few days!

Class 102

My second week assignment consisted of going outside and drawing people around me doing different things, and then choosing the best sketch and represent it in 3d with the provided character. Here is what I came up with.