Hello class 3! ...and first blocking for part 1 of "anim jam"

Class 2 "psychology of body mechanics" was mindblowingly good! I learned sooo much from it. Now I am hoping that class 3 "advanced body mechanics" will overwhelm me just as much.

My mentor for this class is Sean Ermey, have a look at his site here: http://www.seanermey.com/
Looking forward to be guided by him through the following three months.

At the start of this class we got to choose if we wanted to keep all three assignments of this class collected under a unifying theme ("anim jam") or if we wanted to have different themes for each assignment ("animation exercise").
I'll go for the anim jam and the choice of my theme is "Stewie at the airport"...

The story goes something like this:
Stewie is late for his flight, steps accidently on slippery floor and does a little sliding around on it, loses his ticket which gets stuck high up on a roof beam.
In the second part he will have to climb up there and get it - and of course it ends with him falling smack to the ground (breaking a leg and getting severe brain concussion in the process).
In the third part he will have head and leg in bandages, jumping along on a crutch on his way to the plane. He slides on his crutch and the ticket flies off and falls down into a draining hole in the ground. END.

So there I have my work for the rest of this fall piled up for me.

Here is a first initial blocking of part 1.
Of course things are missing here and there... The part where the legs aren't moving at all right now is where they later will spin around as crazy...



Cheers!

Eric Goldberg talking pose-to pose, spacing and breakdowns

Still a little mad at myself for cheating the planning stage in my last assignment I stumbled across these clips, uploaded by Jeremy Hopkins.

Animation guru Eric Goldberg talks about animators not using strong poses enough.
Eric says he usually figures it all out before he even starts to draw. Pre-thinking, that's what is lacking today with many young animators.

Do I feel guilty as charged!



What's missing in CG and hand drawn reels.



benefits of planning



benefits of pose to pose in CG animation



about Ken Harris, who knew EXACTLY where to put his breakdown drawing



That's it for this time. Thanks Jeremy for uploading these clips.

And don't forget to check out Eric's book "animation crash course". You can find it on amazon...!

class 2: what bad planning can get you into

This was my final job from class 2 at Animation mentor.

I learned a lot from this assignment, the main lesson being, "it's no bloody good to be to sloppy in your planning, stupid!"

I wanted to do a nerdy dance of some kind ( and of course Stewie would have to perish at the end of it ) - so I searched for some funny clips and found these on youtube. Nothing wrong with them per se.



Fun references, right? Just to go ahead with planning? Yeah. So I did some sketches:

Here is the problem; I cheated, I didn't do them well enough! Breakdown positions weren't there! Worse; I didn't THINK about how the dance would transition from pose to pose. And even WORSE; I didn't really think of it in blocking either.

The result of this was that I made a first pass of blocking, noted all things I hadn't prepared well enough, had to start over and redo the blocking - just to find even more stuff that i should have thought of in the very beginning.  Highly frustrating when you KNOW that you could have avoided much of this by giving the whole thing a little more time in the planning stage!

The final clip looks like this, and I am NOT pleased with it. It lacks snappiness, feels slow and has not near enough "nerdiness" in it.  Because I was lost in all sorts of "redo it"-traps through the process and forgot about the big picture.



What can I say? A good learning experience, after all. :-)

Class 2 - Killing Stewie by weather

After Ballie the 2-legged poor bastard had been killed by getting crushed under a falling weight, the next in turn was Stewie - this time it was the armless version of Stewie we got to work on. A good thing really, it makes you concentrate on the hips and spine and learn to do that stuff before you get distracted with hands and arms. Smart thinking, AM.  :)

In this second assignment I wanted to let Stewie die in a horrible storm. (The actual title of the assignment was "walking in heavy wind". But I of course needed some death in there too, I have my theme of "horrible, unexpected deaths" to attend to.)

So this was my first scenario:

But as I timed out the scene it got a little too long... (we had to keep it under 200 frames)  so I simplified the whole thing and let him just blow off a cliff instead. Like this:

Our mentor, Leigh Rens, said his OK and three weeks later this was the result:





With a little grass waving hard in the wind and the occasional leaf flying by the illusion will be there, I think. Maybe I'll get back to those props and environment things if I ever get back to polishing this shot later on.

Soon I'll post the third assignment of this class. It's still not completely finished so you may have to wait a week or two for it.  Cheers!

Class 2 - psychology of body mechanics.

It's been a while since I updated anything, so now I thought that I would get my ass out of the wagon (don't know if that's understandable english but in swedish it's an often used expression) and show some of the latest stuff I have been working on at animation mentor.

By now we are getting into the final weeks of class 2, "psychology of body mechanics", and in this class we have been working on three different shots, all of them paying special attention to body mechanics.
I'll make a blog note on each of my three assignements, this is the first one, the other two will be coming up shortly.

So - when you are working on one piece for three weeks you might just as well make it fun and entertaining to yourself. Which is what i did. I decided to make my three pieces add up to a little series of "horrible, unexpected deaths".

The body mechanics assignment was to make a 180 degree turn. So I videotaped myself to get reference for the body mechanics stuff and made this planning sketch.

My mentor in this class, Leigh Rens (cool guy and awesome animator BTW!), liked the setup so I went ahead with this plan and for three weeks I worked on just this little piece.

But I needed a sudden death too, to keep my theme going. Some unexpected thing was what I wanted. It ended up looking like this:




If I get back to polishing this stuff I'll put a text on the weight saying: "property of Monty Python". LOL.

I simply love "Charlie and Lola"

Not much more to add, really. "Charlie and Lola" is a wonderful series!
And it's no wonder to me that it has been such a success. The stories and the art of Lauren Child is fantastic! And the style of the tv-production fascinates me too, it's done in modern digital cutout style, which leaves the viewer plenty of room for his or her own imagination - and those true and well made children voices in the soundtrack also make it really easy to connect with the characters on screen.

Here is an old clip (from 2008) when the production scooped a double-BAFTA win at the EA British Academy Children's Awards. Children's presenter Barney Harwood interviews Lauren Child, Claudia Lloyd and Kitty Taylor backstage to find out the secrets behind their success.





And here you can see an example of the thrilled audience watching the show:

The hard life of freelancing

It's a hard life. Especially for freelancers.