[ p l a c i d c h a o s / A M ]

Definetly check this out! This is a short that a fellow CCAD student has been slaving over for quite some time, and trust me, his hard work really paid off. As you can read from the bill, "Gesundheit" has been nominated for "Best Animation" at the New York International Film Festival, check out the trailer to see why...

Hi-res

Lo-res

While your at it, check out Pablo's sweet sketches too. Plan on seeing Pablo's name rolling during the credits of your favorite animated features in the coming years...

I just read about this on AM's forum, and remarkably I believe I'm going to be able to go! I arrive in LA just a bit after 5p on Friday and Max is going to pick me up and off we go. A chance to go to the Academy, hear Brad Bird and Eric Goldberg speak, and see the Cudequest family collection of animated movie posters.

Wow, I'm so excited about this I can barely contain myself, nothing like this ever happens in cow-town!

Ha, this will top Lucas' talk on Monday, and it's only $3! Of course, if you add in the plane ticket...

The rockin' Rick O'Conner gave our lecture again this week, this time on weight and balance, which was appropriate considering he's twice Sean's size. Not that Rick is that big, Sean is just that small...

Our assignment this week was to make improvements on the blocking of our shot we started last week, the heavy push. Here are my revisions and improvements.

Hmm, so you don't notice much? Well go back and compare this with last week's assignment. I wanted to spend this week tightening up my blocking, but instead I had to go back and fix all my horrible poses. You would think that after watching last weeks awesome class on posing that I would never create another poor pose in my life. Obviously this was not the case...

On a side note, though not to make excuses, last week I had a horrible case of poison ivy from playing paintball. If you know me, you know how bad I get poison ivy/sumac/oak/etc...

My right hand was the most concentrated area and horribly swollen and gross, which needless to say, left me unable to do pretty much anything at all last week. That meant that I had to do both this and last week's assignments this week. I love animating, but a double dose of AM homework is hard to keep up with, especially when I want to do an excellent job, (so much for that). So anyway, in some regards I am sure that played a small part in the quality of the past two weeks work. Hopefully I will be able to make up for it next week, but then again, next week is full of Siggraph preparations and my flight out of here. Oh wow.

Oh, and if anyone cares, my poison ivy is going away. I still itch like crazy, but I'm not as swollen or oozing anymore. Fun stuff...

Lesson #3, and it's great. Why did I pay for art school???

Ok, I watched this weeks lecture 1,000,001 times. IT WAS THAT GOOD!

The lesson this week was a deeper look on posing, and how to make poses that are appealing, clear, strong, tell a story, simple, non-cliche... the list goes on and on. If you think about it, posing is really the most important part of animation, (yeah, I know, I say that every week about whatever principle we are currently studying). It's true about posing though, you could have the best timing and overlap in the world but if your poses aren't clear, the audience has no idea what the character is doing.

So there, posing is the most important part of animation at least this week.

Our assignment this week is to start blocking out a new shot, in stepped mode, of Stewie pushing a heavy object up an incline. Here's my first blocking pass.

So is the box really that heavy, or is Stewie that wimpy? Kinda like the chicken/egg question, isn't it?

I think it's a decent start, though some of the poses are pretty bad, and the timing needs tweaked. This is a good example of why you need to use video reference as just that, reference. If you follow it too closely, certain things don't work very well, ie: the feet positions/rotations.

Crits or comments are welcome as always, really. This means you.