The Shot

Hey guys!

I am back like I promised ... and this time with my final shot that I've been working on for the last 3 weeks pretty much! :)

There still is a lot of scope for improvement and I am still tweaking stuff on it... ! I am uploading what I have on it so far !

We were given a pick list to choose our shot from and this time I decided to have my character Lose balance and fall Just in a more descriptive way ... coming up with a motive and a "Why is he doing what he is" sorta thing to make my shot a bit more interesting ! :)

Hope u enjoy seeing it as much as I enjoyed working on it! :)

THE SHOT:

I am now working on another shot ... this time I picked Walking on a narrow beam ! :) I am ever so excited working on this shot too!! And guess what?????? this time the character has arms tooo ! Wicked, Init? :P ill upload stuff I work on, pretty soon up here !

Right, I'm back to animating!
Have fun u guys! Xxxx

The Personality Walk

I worked a bit further on the from Term 1; Posting that up here too! Decided to go with a happy double bounce walk here ! Hope u enjoy it ! :)

The SHOT :

I'd love to hear back from anyone ov u who has suggestions or criticisms on anything posted up here... either up here or email me ! Thanks a ton for your suggestions already! Its helped me improve a whole lot I think ! shoot me an email if you wish to see the shots in quicktime and to be able to scrub through them frame by frame ! :)

Yet Another Awesome Term !

Hey Folks !

I've been very lazy to post stuff up on the blog ever since this term started ! but the good news is that I've been spending a fairly good amount of time on my assignments and stuff...which is cool ! about 10 hrs a day on an average [not talking of the late nights I spend in front of the computer] :P ... its way better than last term and my grades are a lot better this term, I've managed to break my record with consecutive A's this term so I'm happy! Ya ya i know...grades don't mean much.... but they sure boost u to do way better the next week and the next :) ! That's one of the things keeping my motivation up !

Oh and I need to talk about my Mentor for this term [since I've cheekily escaped off this blog for a whole 2 months]!

I have yet another amazing Mentor for this term ! His name is Elliot Roberts and he is Awesome! Very helpful, friendly and really cool ! Originally from Texas, he studied animation from the Academy of Art in San Francisco .He's worked on movies like Robots and Iron Man. He is now working with a games studio called Fine Studios animating on the upcoming game Brutal Legend starring Jack Black.
http://www.doublefine.com/news.php !

He is truly awesome! Keeps us motivated all the time and the q n a's are very interesting ...not only does he answer all our queries we have during the week but he makes it a point to go beyond and show us awesome clips and references addressing posing and timing in live action movies ! Its amazing to watch him in the q n a's! He also showed us some parts of what he worked on in Iron Man and how he addressed certain issues ! I am totally totally INSPIRED ! He is a truly amazing Mentor !

This term is called The psychology of body mechanics. We pretty much concentrate on how the body moves for the most part of our animations.

Every 3 weeks we're asked to pick from a list of actions and each on the list has its level of difficulty we can choose from! We do a Video reference for the action we pick, study it well,... observe people around, plan our shot, nail down the key poses....drawing nice silhouettes into thumbnails on an estimated time line (Story Boards) and I even go ahead putting in breakdown poses once I am happy with the key poses in the drawings. This takes me about a week that we're allotted to think about what I want to do and how to do it. yep I am learning to spend most of my time planning the shot than actually animating the shot in Maya and this is sure making my shot in Maya a lot more easier than it ever was for me! I love it !

For the first Assignment I decided to go for the easiest ...it being our character taking a side step to understand how the body weight would shift as a step is taken to the side. Pretty much focusing on the hips here ! I did a video reference for the same and thumb nailed my poses as a part of planning the shot. I'd probably skip the video reference here...and take you straight to the planning sketches and the final shot !
So here goes!

Assignment 1. : I picked to do a side step on a character, called Ballie [pretty much cuz its a ball with legs] :P !

PLANNING SKETCHES:

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE

.....and the final shot :

I'll keep you posted with more I promise. I am working on an even more exciting shot for this week and I'm almost done with polishing it. So ill have it up pretty soon ...by the weekend I reckon and the reference video and planning thumbnails for the next shot I have in mind to animate :) !

Right! Its 1:30 am here ... and I should really be hitting the sack! So ill catch u guys later ! have fun till then !

Signing out for now !

Cheers !

Sheeba Xx

Week 7

The one leg Jump !

Another week over !

Hey guys,....
another week over...and its gone so quick! I didn't get enough time to update the blog cuz of assignments and projects :) but its never too late ! So here we are...!

This week was more about the Principle of "Overlapping Action" or successive breaking of joints.

In the assignment we had to animate a pendulum ... that I'm gonna post right away without anymore delay ! :)

On the Planning:

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE IT

The Assignment:

Planning and Blocking

The week's over with a blink of an eye ! It was awesome ... so much fun.

This week all I did was animate and wrestle with the graph editor. It was a bit overwhelming to start with and to be honest, I felt kinda lost in the curves and splines ! but i think I'm already getting the feel of it and I should be more comfortable with the Graph Editor the more I work on it now on ! :)

Right! on the assignment ... this is what I submitted for this week

On the Planning:

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE IT

The Assignment of a bouncing Basket ball:

THE BOUNCING BALL

The Sketches that depict an emotion of Excitement:

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE IT

Posing that Excitement from one of the sketches :

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE IT

Posing an emotion (Stu Proposing- A revision from last week based on Mario's Critiques) :

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE IT

And now I need to get out of this room and see what the outside world looks like today ! :D

Oh ya and my room's a mess too !!!! I've been neglecting everything this week to hand in a decent assignment lol ! Need to get other stuff organized and ya Week 4 in 30 minutes!! Yayyyyy!!! Can wait to hop onto the lecture and start the assignment for this week !! I might actually do that in a couple of hours from now after i clean my messy messy room :P !

Catch u guys soon again but blogging off for now !

Sheeba :)

Week 3 and Already Animating ! :)

Entered week three before I even knew it! :) That's how fast its going for me and I am loving every bit of it.

This week is more on Planning and Blocking! The lectures are awesome ! With so many examples and so much stuff it all makes so much sense. This week's lecture sorta answered so many of my basic questions that I've been wanting to know answers to! Questions like Pose to pose, straight Ahead or Layered? which one?? that's been One big question mark for me always. But I think I'm starting to understand the concepts a lot better now. Everything seems to fall into place with this weeks lecture.. its awesome! Totally ! Its just going to need a lot of practice on my end before I have it at the back of my head and on the tip of my fingers!! :)

Based on the Lecture, we got our assignment which is pretty much to re create that movement of a bouncing basket ball with a lot more exaggeration and using the principles that can apply to it so far ! and also of course a few more posing to do which is great 'cuz that's giving me a sense of identifying strong posing (for keying strong poses in Maya in the coming weeks and months) and it helps me learn to communicate an emotion in just one drawing which is awesome I think!

I so feel it to be the right place for me! I am learning a lot and loving every bit of it! Have my Q n A for this week on Wednesday at 7 pm and am quite looking forward to it with questions I have for my mentor ! :)

Blogging of for now!

Sheeba Xx

The Last leg of Week 2 !

Click image to enlarge

There are a few of the versions I've been working on ... but I dint risk re-submitting my work yesterday cuz the internet connection was rubbish and I didn't wanna risk getting stuck uploading the file, and getting a Penalty of one lower grade! But, I think I might wanna use one of these for later on the reel so its not too bad! :) and I am happy with what I submited at the first place... well I did push it beyond that but its ok i think ! We'll see ! :)

Saturday was fun ! Met up with a friend in the noon and then with another after that and then clasmates in the eveing. Was nice catching up with everyone after a long time! :)

End of the week 2 ! :)

We finally coming to the end of week 2. Its been awesome !

I just submitted the assignment and this is what I came up with after all the criticisms and suggestions... ! I am pretty much gonna be off Stu all day tomorrow...so thought it to be wise to submit this today, tho I have all plans of working on it again tomorrow in the night and see if I can come up with something good and re submit my work in. It sure needs a lot more tweaking I think but not sure what exactly right now...! Stu can get much better at proposing than that still tho !

I am meeting up a Friend who studied 3D Animation like me, at the University of Kent an year after me and is now a term ahead of me at AM. Small world init? eagerly looking forward to that ! and then I'm gonna have my classmates coming into town for a small sorta get together/catching up in the evening ! so that should be fun too i guess ! :)

But I'm gonna work on getting Stu to propose even better so all he gets is a "yes" as an answer :) and me a good grade in the pursuit ! hehe

So looking forward to start Animating from next week onwards ! :)

Blogging off for now !

Sheeba. Xx

Getting Stu to propose ! awwww !

I think I am done with the sketches ....pretty much ! I wanted to do some more but was very surprised to know that people liked a couple of 'em for Stu to Personify. Since I got a so many votes for Stu to propose, I decided to go with it (I was very tempted with this one anyway) ! :)

Right, so I've a few versions of the pose here but not sure which one is the strongest so far....or if there even is that ONE strong pose among these et all ! If u have more suggestions or criticisms on the way his legs are posed or arms , torso, head what ever...... I soo wanna hear them all ! :) would be very helpful !

Cheers !

AM, Week 2 : Sketching and Posing !

We moved into Week 2 of Animation Mentor and its been a blast. I totally love it. I'm surprised I didn't quite understand what line of action meant before this and all the principles are explained really well with awesome examples. Just in the last one week I've learned sooo much not just from my mentor Mario, but also from my batch mates, classmates and seniors that I didn't learn in the One year of MSc. A lot of things have come up very new to me. I am so in the right place... and highly motivated!!

Right ! We got our first assignment for this week to sketch poses and then personifying a character to one of the poses....! I have been sketching and noticing people in cafe's bookshops, stores, liabrary, the high streets, almost everywhere really and have bumped into a lot many people staring at me awkwardly sometimes when i try n quickly line draw some of em... haha its funny tho! But its all good. I have some poses sketched really quick so these are more line drawings done in about 2 seconds each to get the idea of the line of action in a pose. so these aint the best of drawings or nething but I think they do tell u what's really happening. I am uploading some here right now but am not yet satisfied with any of em so i guess im gonna take another shot at posing sketches tonight !

Will be able to upload some more drawings tomorrow hopefully !

Cheers !

Reel 2008

I thought of posting my current show reel here for everyone. I know its not the best of anything but well that's the whole point. It sure could work as a measure of improvement on the stuff that I am going to work on ! :)

Blogging off for now ! Sheeba Xx

Loving every bit of this.... !!!!!

Hey Folks ! Wish u all a very very Happy 2009 there...! Hope its a lot better than 2008 for u .... 'cuz I know for sure that this is gonna be one hell of a year for me and my friends at school and we have all intentions to ROCK it !

Finally Started with AM! Whoop Whoop ! Its all just awesome! The moment we got on campus, I was so overwhelmed by the amount of stuff in there, that curiosity overtook excitement and then I bumped into fellow classmates and batch mates all asking for directions from each other...and no one knowing their way around to help others! was so much fun tho ! It sure is gonna take some time getting our way around the place cuz its HUGE but awesome ! But its getting better now !

Had my 1st Q n A lastnight and my mentor is great ! I have Mario Pochat as my Mentor this term.

http://www.mariopochat.com/

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Picture Source : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0455499/

His IMDB credits include
Doctor Do little 3
Garfield 2: A tail of two kitties
Snow Buddies
Blades of Glory
Need for Speed: Most wanted

His work is really amazing ... I hope I can get even so close to that pretty soon ! Damn ...... goona work for it man !

Right, the Q n A went really well, was supposed to be an hour long but eventually got stretched to a bit over 2 hours! lol that's not strange to us, we can go on and on for days talking about how amazing Animation is ! It was nice to hear everyone out ! We all shared our experiences and what made us all fall in love with animation..... head over heels. It was really inspiring to hear each one of 'em and every time someone came up to speak,.. I couldn't help saying "wow" listening to them. I must 've said that word about what 25 times last night... even more! haha! I'm sure I am gonna learn a lot from each one of em :) ! We're such an awesome bunch of people and I'm loving every bit of this experience ! :)

I'm probably gonna post up stuff I do here on my blog as work in progress or even the finalized ones for your reviews and comments ! So hey guys,... keep 'em coming.. this one is for all of u there.... even if i don't know u....and u have something to suggest, ... you're more than welcome to rip my hard work apart and be as brutal as u wanna! Just write me a review ! Would love to hear from all u guys out there............ :)

Adios!!