Flying logos are not beneath me (yet)...

All work done in Maya 6.0 by kenshi.

So I just finished my first animation for a film. No character animation involved, but it was a good chance to put my modeling, lighting, shading, rendering, and animating skills to use. It's for my friends' newly formed film company and they needed it tonight because they are showing their documentary film "Pariahs" tonight at a fundraiser and wanted a slick intro for their film. Take a look at the finished product.

So the whole thing took 8 hours to do, start to finish, which includes 2 hours of rendering 150 frames. Last night from 8 pm to 4am this morning. Amazing how fast you work when sleep is on the line. I had already designed the logo in Photoshop and Illustrator, but I had to recreate it all in Maya in order to do the movement I wanted to incorporate.

There are some timing and shadow issues I still need to address (slow some things down, etc.) but I have time now that this pre-final draft is done to tweak it to my heart's content.

It was actually pretty fun, seeing how fast I could do this, working backwards so the final product would be finished first in case I ran into any technical problems. (That way they would have something at least to slap onto their trailer.) But things basically went without a hitch and I'm not that worse for wear (considering I usually need at least 8 hours of sleep to not feel like a walking zombie).

I'm supposed to be getting my Student ID# for AnimationMentor today, so I've been checking my email every few minutes like a jonesing crack whore. Word on the street is that the big studios are going to be keeping a careful eye on the work the students put out. Kinda feels like a reality internet show: "Who will be fired this week?" or rather, "Who will be hired?"

I'm going to work hard and do the absolute best I can. I am going to push myself like I've never pushed myself before. Only a week and a half til the ball starts rolling, but once it does, I'm hoping that it can't be stopped.