Thursday, September 16, 2010

Animation Mentor - Class 2, Week 12

Well i suppose i must apologize. It's been well over a month since my last post but with good reason! I swear! haha. There's been a couple things conspiring against me this term. The first is the amount of work required to complete the assignments. With the introduction of spines and heads and arms and hands, (as well as more difficult assignments,) the level of complexity and thus the amount of time necessary to complete the assignments has risen dramatically this term.

On top of all that, i spent most of the term away on business, at Siggraph, and my favorite, moving to a new apartment. As if all that wasn't enough, i was swamped at work and didn't have internet access at my new joint for a good couple weeks. So i apologize for no uploads, but i had to spend all of the little time i did have kicking butt on my assignments.

I think i did pretty good this semester. My mentor Drew Adams was just plain amazing. He gave me tons of great ideas, and was super critical of my assignments, which for anyway is exactly what i needed. I learned a ton from Drew, and he was truly an inspiration. If you go to AM, try to get him as a mentor! You'll thank me!

So.. rather than recap every week, we're at that point in the term where we upload our Progress Reels, so I'll just go ahead and let you take a look at that!

Our last assignment was another pick list. I chose to go with a dance, but i wanted to do a dance that was truly horrible that the character *thinks* is awesome. I used Elaine's notorious Thumb Dance from Seinfeld as my main point of reference, and spent a lot of time on the front half trying to build up that 'I'm awesome, this dance is gonna be the best' attitude. I particularly like those first 100 or so frames, as i didn't rely on the Elaine reference and really spent a lot of time with my mentor hashing out my ideas. The music is obviously not the original music.. just something i slugged in. If this were to go on my real demo reel, I'd find a good track and re-animate a bit to hit the beats properly.

I'm also quite fond of my first shot this term where Ballie is jumping the Gap. I just feel like i did a really good job getting as much out of that limited rig as i could. The sticky gum assignment came out decent i guess, but i'm least happy with it. That assignment fell in during my Siggraph/Moving/etc phase so i just didn't feel like i got the amount of time into it that i would have liked to spend.

Anyhoo. Without further ado... here it is! My Class 2 Progress Reel. Let me know what you think!

2 comments:

  1. Great job on the dance...and everything else, of course! I love watching the progression and seeing how the animation develops. Keep up the good work!

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  2. I also like hearing how you think through and develop the concepts and techniques - not just seeing the animation progression. I know it takes more time to write that stuff down, which is hardly time you can afford sometimes, so I want you to know it's appreciated.

    When I look at art, I often wonder where the ideas come from and how it was developed from the initial concept to the final product...which takes a lot of time and effort, not just a great idea.

    Lots of people have great ideas, but only a relatively small few are willing to put in the effort to figure out how to make them real and be an artist - so it's interesting to get an "inside peek" at the process.

    One of the things I've always admired about you, Ryan...you follow through on stuff, even when it's hard, which is an even rarer talent than your artistic ability and imagination. You even usually make it seem like fun and project a good attitude, too...an even RARER talent. Good job guy! Love Ya!

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