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

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.

Our class this week was totally wicked! Rick O'Conner, from ILM fame, was our guest lecturer and we followed him as he took a shot from beginning to end. While he didn't cover anything particularly new or mind-blowing, it was definitely awesome to watch a pro tackle a shot, and I would probably rank it as the best AM class yet. It really reinforced how vital the planning/thumbnailing stage of the animation process is, as well as the need for video reference. It's not until after studying the reference frame by frame, and roughing out the timing and ALL his poses on paper that Rick even approaches the computer.

Our assignment this week was to finish/clean up the personality walk that we have been working on for the past two weeks. Here is what I handed in.

Yeah, pretty stinky, eh? I would have to say that it is easily the worst animation (if it even qualifies to be called that), that I have done since starting AM. The timing is bad, the spacing is bad, the cleanup is bad, and the anticipation and overlap are even worse.

It's almost like I forgot everything I have learned so far in AM...
1) I didn't have enough breakdowns
2) the keys and breakdowns that I did have were spaced too evenly
3) I didn't have all the controls keyed on the same frames in the blocking stage, so cleanup was near impossible
4) and the list goes on...

So yeah, it's a horrible piece o' poo, but I think I learned more from this failure than any of the other decent assignments (not that makes me feel any better watching it). I think the most important thing is to thumbnail and block much tighter, which was also reinforced by watching Rick. Doing all of that planning on paper keeps you in control of the animation and keeps the computer from taking over, otherwise you end up with floaty, even, and spline-y crap like this. Lesson learned.

You may have noticed that I don't have any of my personal AM lecture notes posted on this site anymore.

Or maybe you didn't notice. (If not, you should be more observant, after all, observation is one of the first lessons to being an animator!)

Anyways, on June 15th I found this "Cease and Desist" order pinned to my front door with a deeply embedded shuriken.

The note went on to say that my online lecture notes were too detailed and were giving away too much supa-dupa secret info, and that if I didn't stop posting them, the three Great White Animation Ninjas were going to take turns animating horrible things happening to a voodoo rig that strongly resembled me, (that my friend, could be the poster child for run-on sentences). I had but no choice to comply, as I have seen the things that can be done with these voodoo rigs and obviously don't want to experience such horrible trauma myself...

That being said, Boom, Shawn, and Carlos were actually very cool about the whole ordeal and merely asked that I take down my lecture notes and refrain from posting such detailed accounts of my experiences at AM. I found this to be completely understandable, as I wouldn't want to give away trade secrets or help anyone circumvent AM in anyway. So I apologize to AM as a whole, and strongly urge anyone that enjoyed my notes to seriously check out AnimationMentor.com, and see if maybe it would be a good fit for you. It has been an awesome experience for me thus far, as well as everyone one else I know that is going through it.

On a side note, I do still want to help out anyone interested in the art of animation in any way that I can, so I will be posting other animation notes that I posses. Some are my own personal notes from lectures that I have attended by cool people such as Ed Hooks and Dr. Stuart Sumida, as well as a collection of notes gathered from various sources on the web, graciously sent to me by Kaveh Michael. I'll try to upload a new set of notes every week, or every other week, depending on my schedule and current bandwidth. I also have several of Andrew Loomis' books, of which none are still in print, in pdf format. If reading in your browser suits you, you can go ahead and start reading here, otherwise hold your horses and I'll make one pdf available per month.

In the meantime, don't forget to check out The Animation Podcast. Clay Kaytis has done a swell job and has managed to already score some truly awesome interviews in the few short months that he's been doing this.

Enough of my blabbering, time to get back to work.

This is thread #2 of a very helpful and informative ongoing series. You should check it out. Seriously. I'm not even kidding.

This week's lesson was a deeper look at anticipation; how to observe it in both reference and everyday life, as well as how to incorporate it into your shots.

Our assignment this week had several different facets to it. First we were to take our blocking of a personality walk from last week and add a start to the beginning of the walk. This was to force us to focus on adding animation to an already created shot, something that apparently happens quite frequently in the real world. In addition, we were also asked to add in the arms for the whole shot. Luckily we are still only in the blocking stage...

Here is what I came up with

I think that for the blocking stage it's pretty decent. It has a bit of overlap, and things seem to hit pretty well, though next week we have to clean up the shot, so that will be the true test. Oh, and ignore the weird hand positions in the beginning, for some reason the ik/fk switch isn't allowing keys correctly, that or I'm ignorant on how to work them correctly...

Another sweet "Meet the Artist" going on over at CGTalk, this time with Victor Navone.

I still remember watching "Alien Song" over and over again when I first saw it online, mesmerised by the movement. I really hope to have him as a mentor before I'm finished with AM, he does great work, and we seem to have a very similar sense of humour. Make sure to check this thread out. Do it.