Back from the DEAD ! :)

Hey Guys!

Yeah been ages I know. Have had a lot going on, in the outside world for me. and I hate to admit it, I've been a wee bit lazy too, as far as posting stuff here goes.

Last term I had MIKE STERN (Animator with DreamWorks - http://blog.sternio.com/) as my mentor. He worked on movies like Kung fu Panda, Bee Movie, Monsters Vs Aliens and very recently, How to train your Dragon! He had loads of awesome suggestions on pushing your shots beyond the normal in the final polishing stage.

Its a shame, I couldn't get to take much away from him as I would have liked to, if my laptop didn't crash in the middle of Last term leaving me without a computer to work with for a goood 4 weeks of Term time which was fatal but I managed to pass alright with an ok GPA which I ain't so proud of. Agggh! hate when things like that happen. De-motivates u to the core. Hate it, hate it, hate it. My GeForce burnt out on the Alien-ware and it wouldn't work again. I couldn't restart the laptop and would have LOST almost everything on there had I not taken the backups on my WD. phew! so that was good. I recently bought another WD to back up my back up and had to buy a new laptop to work on. Last term was a nightmare for me! but now I am a happy soul :) ! Had to take a Leave of absence from school for a term, as my situation demanded it!

I'm back now and am going to try my best to be blogging in regularly with updates on stuff I animate and stuff that I DO NOT animate :) !

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 :)