Crunched what I could before going to Vegas on Friday for NAB. It’s pretty rough and trying the record every 4th frame for blocking as one lesson suggests as a technique didn’t really work out well for me, I think its complicated things and made it really hard for me to focus on great poses and timing as my mind is too focused on making the 4th frame instead of thinking about it is “KEY” frames.
Hopefully I can fix it up a lot while in Vegas, but well it is Vegas and I’m a notorious gambler so I’m not setting high expectations on myself.
An overall uneventful week for me personally, I took the time to recover in the evenings which of course meant I was also procrastinating a little from assignment, I kept trying things but not being happy with what was coming out at all, but I think I finally started to figure it out. Still a lot of issues in it at this point but the nice thing is there two more weeks to refine it and I know Mike will have a lot of critiques.
QA was awesome we went over again and Mike is really good about analyzing the lecture and discussing things he likes and doesn’t like about what was said. Really makes you think and not just take the lectures as the bible but more of a good recommendation, and really find your own way.
Anyways here is the beginning of Ballie taking a very big step across a gap.
Week 1 of class 2, which focuses on Psychology of Body Mechanics. The cool thing about this class is its really only 3 projects broken up into 4 weeks each, for each stage of the animation, Planning, Blocking, Refining (blocking +) and Final.
My new Mentor is Mike Walling, who has sort of been all over the place and worked at a lot of different studios, PDI, DNA, Blue Sky, and now Sony Imageworks, which to me, means exposure to several studio environments. While a lot will be similar from studio to studio I know even from studio tours for MAXON and such that each studio can differ a fair bit in how they work, and having a mentor who isn’t just saying this is how I do it because that’s how our studio does it, Mike can really say what it is like all over the place, and he’s had the chance to work with a lot of different animators too. I’m pretty excited to soak up as much as possible from him
So far the styles between Mike and Paul are quite different, Paul was a tougher marker and Mike says he has a similar reputations which is good I like a mark that really indicates how I am doing. But Mike doesn’t seem to provide a big email list of notes like Paul did after QA, but as I just noticed about 15 minutes ago, Mike likes to provide an overall class critique on his workspace which is just kick ass. Its good for a general note on what he is noticing a lot of people do and the importance of why certain things are assigned the way they are and what the purpose of things like sketching etc are for. I know I’ll be looking forward to these each week.
Anyways, I went out on the patio and recorded almost 40 minutes of reference trying each of the various options we had to work from for the assignment and chose to work with the large step assignment.
Well I’m already done the first class, and I seriously can’t believe 3 months has already flown by, two jobs and school sure helps me pass the time. No real assignment this week other than combining all my assignments into one reel, so here it is:
Tomorrow we find out who our new mentor and classmates are, its kind of cool that every three months we get new classmates and mentors. It really helps to build a community and friends and contacts. A big thank you however to Paul Allen for being such a fantastic mentor with great notes and advice. I’ll definitely make sure to pester him for another critique here and there down the road.
Wow the last assignment in for this term, now its just refining and making a progress reel of all my assignments for this term. Its nice to have a little more time this week as I’m currently crunching on a freelance job as well, and will be heading to San Francisco Thursday and Friday for GDC as mentioned in my last posting.
So for Next week look forward to a compilation of all my Class 1 assignments. For now Here is the finished character walk.
