Class 2 Wohoo!

Ok, now it's really been a while since I last posted here. And again ALLOT has happened. First of all let me show you the skipping animation that I finished in class 1. Remember the blocking pass I put up here. Well here's the end result....

Now as you can see it's very short. The reason for that is I went to Aruba for a 4 week vacation :D And I really had to get this done and uploaded as soon as possible so I could go. Because I couldn't work on it in Aruba. So thats why it's a little rushed like that. To save time I even had him skip out of frame..saved me allot of time.

But the mechanics of it work, I mean it isn't horribly bad or anything. I actually got a B+ for it. However it could have been better though, if I had spend a little bit more time on it.

But anyway..the most important thing is I passed class 1, and I'm now in class 2 of the Animation Mentor program. The class is called '' Psychology of Body Mechanics '' and teaches us the importance of weight, balance and all sorts of things to make our animation look real. And my mentor for this class is Josh Book.

Josh Book is a Creative & Animation Director living in the Bay Area. He currently is the CG Supervisor at WildBrain Animation Studios in San Francisco. Before moving to the Bay Area, Josh was the CG Creative Director at Nickelodeon Animation Studios in Burbank, CA, where he oversaw all CG series and development work, including the "Madagascar Penguins" series, "Tak and the Power of Juju", and the "Bubble Guppies" pilot. His animation career started in 1995 at Electronic Arts, and he's since worked as a Supervising Animator, Director, Production Designer, Lead Artist, and FX Animator in feature films, TV, commercials, games and new media. An "on the job" and self-taught animator, he holds a B.A. in Fine Art from UC Santa Cruz, has contributed to several books on animation, and has taught classes on animation and Maya.

Believe it or not but it's been so long since I've last posted that we're already half-way through the class. We are already at week 6 of 12. And we actually already finished an animation assigned. In this class we get a list of things that our character can do, and we have the liberty to pick one. I chose to do a character kicking a ball. Nothing special, nothing too difficult or easy. For these assignments we get 3 weeks now. 1 Week to plan and block the shot, 1 week to refine the shot and another to really polish it up. So here's the first assignment I did for class 2. The ball kick.