Week 3- Assignment #2 Part 2

The second part of our assignment for week 3 finally got us into some animating! This week's lesson was all about timing and spacing, and every animator starts off learning about this with a simple bouncing ball. First we had to plan out our bouncing ball in our sketchbook, showing what frames the ball was hitting the ground and which were up in the air, creating arcs. As the ball loses momentum the arcs should be getting smaller and smaller and the points of contact on the ground should be getting closer together. Now this part to me was probably the hardest part. I'm the kind of person who just jumps into Maya and tries to feel out where things should go, which my mentor says isn't always a bad thing, but I know I will a better animator if I can completely plan out everything on paper before I animate. I really over-thought this and it gave me some anxiety because I didn't know how to figure out where exactly to put the key frames. With the help of my "Animator's Survival Kit" book I think I ended up with a pretty solid basis for my ball bounce

So I went off of this planning when I had the ball in 3D and then just made some little tweaks to my graph editor once I had it in there. (For non-animators, the graph editor is where you can actually see your animation in curve form just like it is in the drawing, but you can adjust the tangents on the keyframes like a bezier curve). I had previously done the bouncing ball a few years ago when I started the animation program at UCF but it had been a long time. I was way too worried about this assignment because I felt pressure that it had to be really good, because I do already have an animation degree. The cool thing about going back to this was that I actually learned a different approach to doing it, so even with something as simple as the bouncing ball I'm still learning things I didn't know before. So this is how my ball turned out

Before the assignment was due, I messaged my mentor and told him I was having trouble getting the rotation of the ball along with squash and stretch, so during my critique he acknowledged that and said it was really a limitation of the ball rig but he would go over how to do it in our live Q and A that week. I got a really good response from him on my ball. He said it was very naturalistic but my spacing on the bounces was actually a bit cartoony so it would help to maybe add some squash and stretch to that. Luckily we get to revise this assignment for next week so I can take what he showed us in the Q & A and try to apply it for next week.

Week 3- Assignment #2 Part 1

Our assignment from week 3 had two parts, so this is part one- creating a pose to convey "excitement." I like this assignment a little better than the first because we had something specific we were aiming for, whereas last week was a little vague and we could pick any pose we wanted. I took the notes I got from the first assignment and tried applying them to the sketches this week. I drew some more variety and tried pushing my poses a little bit more. The difficulty in this assignment was that there's seem to only be so many things you can do with your body alone to show excitement and we want to avoid cliche. A lot of poses tend to look very similar to other students' drawings. So these are the sketches I started off with...

Sometimes I find it hard to draw what I really want and I really wanted to try pushing some poses further, so I took them into photoshop and drew over them in blue to see if I could get something better. I ended up getting a lot of different opinions as to which pose I should pick for this week, so I decided to try out a bunch of them in 3D. I added them to my photoshop sketches...

I ended up choosing the air guitar pose because I felt it was the least cliche and I didn't see a lot of other people with that pose. 

My mentor liked that I chose that one also. I got some great feedback from him this week- luckily it was mostly positive stuff! He liked that I listened about the line of action in the arms from the previous week and they flowed together well in this pose, and he suggested I could move his bent elbow up a little to push it further. He also suggested that I make his bent knee more a part of the body's line of action so the movement flowed better in the pose. This is how his drawing ended up...

So after taking his notes into consideration, this is how my final pose turned out...

Now if you really wanna see some excitement, check out part 2 of this assignment! Just don't get too excited....

Week 2- Assignment #1

After an excruciatingly long week of having no assignments (I know, what a nerd, after finally getting a college degree after 10 years I choose to go back for more school and I'm too excited for our first assignment), we finally got one! We were supposed to go out and observe people and sketch interesting poses that we saw and then circle our favorite one. Then we had to go into Maya with the character Stu (supplied by the school) and recreate our drawn pose. I'll be honest with you, that week was a little hectic for me so I looked online for pictures of people in a park and got some ideas for that. I tried to find some interesting poses. Already having knowledge of animation helped because I already had an idea of what makes a pose interesting, however I was a little nervous not knowing what our mentor expected at that point. So here are my sketches...

I really liked 3 and 5, the soccer pose and selfie, so I tried posing them both in Maya. The soccer pose really wasn't translating in 3D the way I had hoped it would. I couldn't seem to create the silhouette I wanted, and for you non-animators, a strong silhouette is extremely important to a good pose in animation. I ended up going with the selfie pose, which is funny because it's the only one that I actually used myself for reference. I think watching girls trying to take the best selfie is kind of funny so I liked how current it made this pose. This is how my 3D pose came out...

The cool thing about our weekly mentor critiques is that they can actually draw right over our work and show us how we could make our poses stronger. This is Mike's

He brought up the issue of weight. Something all animators have to to keep in mind while posing their character is making sure weight is distributed evenly. He drew a line through the center of gravity on my pose and showed me how little of his mass was on the left side compared to the right side- nobody has ever really shown it to me like that and it was really helpful to understand the weight issue. He also pointed out that there could be a stronger line of action with the arms- notice there's more of a distinct line through the arms in his drawing? I also never thought about there being a separate line of action for the arms- I was always just thinking about the body's main line of action. I'm already learning so much just in the second week of class. After watching Mike's critique as well as reading the feedback from friends and other students (our work is public on the AM site to all students and anyone is free to comment), here is my revised Stu pose...

So that about concludes my very first Animation Mentor assignment. I can't wait to learn even more next week! 

Starting Animation Mentor!

Hey everyone! 
This is my first blog but I just started Animation Mentor and I really wanted to share my experience with everyone, especially friends and family who don't live here and always want to hear about what I'm working on! I hope to spread some knowledge to people who may not know a whole lot about the animation industry and to also share with fellow animators. For anyone who doesn't know, Animation Mentor is an online animation school started by industry animators who thought there could be a better way to teach students. The mentors are people who are actually in the industry right now and they each have about 9 students. During the 12 week class we start each week with a prerecorded lecture and an assignment. Once a week our mentor meets with us via Google Hangouts and gives us a lecture and answers any questions we have about the assignment that week or the industry in general. It's really great when they share experiences or pieces of work from movies they worked on in a way we've never seen before. Our assignments are due every Sunday and then our mentors take the time to give each one of us a personal e-critique on how we could improve our work. Right now I am in class one-Animation Basics week 4 with my boyfriend, Chris. Our Mentor is Mike Stern who worked at Dreamworks and now Pixar! He's worked on movies like How to Train Your Dragon (1 and 2), Kung Fu Panda, Monsters vs. Aliens, The Croods, and the upcoming Pixar film Inside Out. In addition to taking the time to meet with us and critique our work weekly he is also currently working on Pixar's next film. I'm so excited to be learning from someone who's worked on some of my favorite animated films!! Another great thing is getting to meet people from all over the world. In our class alone we have people from 3 different countries, all meeting at different times of their day in the same class with Mike. It's already an amazing experience. I'll be posting each of my assignments as we go along, and I'm already behind so I'll try to catch up!

Animation Mentor's website