Class 2 - Session 1

(Read image left to right, top to bottom.)

These are my planning sketches for my first assignment. He's tripping on a sidewalk. It was my first heavy duty reference session. I had a friend videotape me with me holding my arms behind my back. Had I read ahead, I would have known that I would be adding arms the next week and should have filmed myself with arms and all, but oh well. It worked well enough.

I don't think I got the hang of overlap in the spine and head very well. Still not sure if I do yet. Need more practice on that and about a hundred other body mechanic things.

(I'm writing this almost 3 months after the fact, so I have a bit of distance on this, by the way...)


So yeah, this is not a good example of animation. The timing is too slow and there's too much extraneous movement. The overlap in the body during the trip isn't bad, but the timing happens in slow motion and it's not supposed to. Another victim of overanalyzed animation. Also the head could drag a bit more on the way down on the stomp. If I remember correctly, I hardly animated the neck at all - just kept it in the head, which is not the best way to go. I have since changed my methods and always start an extremity movement with the "trunk" of the extremity, be it the neck, the shoulder... Dave Burgess (who is at DreamWorks now) subbed for Victor at our Q&A last night and he recommended we always get the body involved, even on something as simple as a head turn (no one robotically moves just the head, except for well, a mechanical robot...)

Looking back, there is definitely lots of room for improvement on this animation. Still, it's not something I'm going to put on my demo reel. Not engaging enough.

Going from a ball with legs to a body with spine and head with legs was definitely a big transition. The next logical step in complexity that we've been preparing for this whole time, but pretty intimidating nonetheless.

Something I'm also learning is that rough blocking is the easiest and funnest part of the process (so far). Getting good poses comes from the planning and experimenting stage of things, but once they are in, it's fairly easy to move things around, especially if you have set keys on every part of the body on the same frame so you can move everything at once and maintain the integrity of your poses.

But beware, beware. Just because you can throw poses into the computer and move things around to get passable timing in a fairly short amount of time does NOT mean that the rest of the process will go so quickly or smoothly...

Here are some more sketches from my sketchbook. They are all exercises in finding key poses. Hopefully with practice (Dave Burgess talked about getting "miles on your pencil") I will get to the point of being able to animate traditionally. That's one of my big goals because I think it's important that CG incorporates as much of the organic and loose feel of 2D as it can, so understanding how things work in 2D is essential, I feel, to make this happen.

Exciting stuff.

Class 2 Mentor: Victor Navone!

Yes, that is Victor Navone, heavy with child... good thing there's room at the inn for little animation younglings like myself (Victor's pet name for his mentees) at AnimationMentor.com.

I was very, very excited to find out that the Victor Navone would be my second term mentor. This man is actually how I found out about AnimationMentor.com in the first place, come to think of it and has been an inspiration to me since I first discovered his infamous Alien Song short that got him his job at Pixar when Ed Catmull discovered it. I saw it in the late 90's when I worked at Argonaut CG Films as an "animator" (oh, I laugh at the thought of calling what I did then "animation") on the ill-fated sci-fi CG saga The Guardian Oath. I remember my boss, Ben Harrison, pulling it up and all 4 of us crowding around the monitor. We must have watched it over and over.

Since then I would check out Victor's website every so often, cause he would put up new links and info of various sorts. I even ventured to email him once, and to my geeky delight, he responded! I had wanted to know about how easy or hard it was to move into the animation department at Pixar if one were to get a job in, say, the modeling department, or the custodial department -- anything! He said it was very hard to do that, which kind of dashed my hopes, because I knew I didn't have the skills (yet).

That's when I started seriously looking into the Academy of Art in San Francisco. I saw that Cameron Miyasaki went there and got an internship and then a job at Pixar, so I was almost ready to bite the bullet and pay out of my eyes and gums for continuing education, but then I saw this cute little link on Victor's site, announcing a new animation school. I went to the link, lost my jaw somewhere on the floor, and then "googled" all things AnimationMentor.com. I found an interview with the founders, Bobby Beck, Carlos Baena (whose website I had also followed for several years and was very impressed by), and Shawn Kelly (who I wasn't familiar with, but have since gotten to know through AM lectures and in person at Siggraph - great guy). All of these guys seemed so genuinely excited about animation and the prospect of reaching talented and passionate people that have not had the opportunity to learn animation as it should be taught.

At first I thought I must be a) dreaming or b) that it was all a big joke. There was no way they could offer mentorship with industry professionals at that price -- everything sounded so idealistic, like it was personally created for me. Like they had somehow snuck into my dreams and pulled the biggest one out and served it to me on a bargain-priced platter.

And now I am being mentored by Victor Navone - it all comes full circle. No, what would REALLY be circe-of-life material is if I went back to be a mentor myself after a long, illustrious feature animation career (call me a dreamer, I don't care...).

But first things first - Body Mechanics, baby!!

Class 1 - Week 12

Well, there was no assignment for this week. Just a end of term Q&A with Charles where he kind of went through everybody and gave some final advice. Charles was a good mentor - super nice guy and a very talented animator. He emphasized that animation isn't an exact science, so it was interesting to see how he tackled problems, and how his workflow was different from other animators (like how he likes to work in splines from the get-go) and that there are different workflows for different animation needs - the critiques are tailored to each student's work that way. I could always expect very intelligent feedback that wasn't hard-nosed.

I tried to make it a point to leave comments on all of my classmates' workspaces during the week, but wasn't always successful. I saw a lot of other classes really come together and give each other lots of feedback, but alas, that wasn't the case with this first lot. Like in life, it's really up to you to get out there and make friends and get involved. Not that there are factions, but there are obvious benefits to making friends with fellow students that really know their stuff.

There were times that I cared a lot if I was getting comments, and other times when I didn't really care because I thought that the students leaving feedback didn't know what the hell they were talking about. I would only really pay attention to my mentor and to the campus mentors who left comments here and there (Doug Dooley being the premiere, rockstar campus mentor).

I remember feeling a little bombarded and being scared of animating balls with raccoon tails, but slowly growing confident about my budding animation abilities at the end of this first term. All of that was soon to change...

All you ever wanted to know about AM.com...

So check out the Bobby Beck interview at Renderosity. If you're interested in the school and want to find out more about how it all came about, what kinds of things are offered, and why it's such a revolutionary thing, read this. It will give you a very good idea about why AnimationMentor.com is stirring the kind of commotion it has.

I think it's also a good read for current AM students, to hear how Bobby envisions things going from student to mentor and student to student. It's a good gauge to see if you're really getting as much out of your education as you could be. I know I could definitely get a lot more out of it, so I'm currently making the necessary steps to make that possible.

Class 1 - Week 11

It's all about balance... Tuk & Rol is my little tribute to those cute little pill pugs in A Bug's Life. Speaking of that movie, Pixar giant Joe Ranft passed away last week. He was the voice of the caterpillar Heimlich and was one of the head of story people there at the studio. It's a great loss to the animation world, not to mention his family and friends.

Victor Navone (my mentor) said the mood at Pixar was very very sad, and they are at the tail end of animation crunchtime on Cars - very difficult set of circumstances, I would think. The show must go on, of course, and I would guess that's the way Joe would have wanted it...

So back to my piddly little animations...I did some more refining on my "Baywatched" animation.

So, as you can see, I changed the camera. Doug Dooley left me a lot of feedback which I lost when the server turned over for the next session - they wiped it all clean and I wasn't able to get it all down. C'est la vie. I'm much happy with my attempt at overlapping this go around, but I've still got a lot of hours of practice to get under my belt before I feel confident with that.

Carlos Baena (Pixar) emphasized patience, patience, patience to me when I meet him at Siggraph this year. He was rejected several times from Pixar before he finally got in (on the third try, I think), and before he made it, he put up the rejection letters by his bed. His friends thought he was crazy, "Why do you put that stuff up?" But it kept him going somehow and reminded him to have patience.

Bobby Beck (you should know who he is by now without me having to tell you) said overlap takes a long, long time to really master.

Looking back at this assignment (I posting this almost a full 3 months after the fact), I remember how good I thought it was, but now I see that the timing really needs some tightening up and variation, and there's a lot to be refined. Probably the one thing I wouldn't change so much is the reaction of the lifeguard at the end. Other than that, I would say it's only about 75% the way to where it would need to be in order to be "feature quality".

(But who knows, at the end of my training I might say it's only 30%! Who knows...) Lifelong learning, it is...

Class 1 - Week 10

For this week's assignment, i tried killing three birds with one stone. 1) walk with personality 2) 180 degree turn (overachiever suggestion from last week and continued into this week and 3) overlapping action revision. I never revised the Tailor animation from weeks ago that sucked so bad, so I came up with a little scenario to address all three issues.

Tailor's tail became a ponytail for Ballie, and a second Ballie does somewhat of an 180 degree turn, but slightly modified for story purposes. The Ballie with ponytail (and pink swimsuit) is obviously the personality walk, and it's so funny to me what people had to say when they saw my work in progress.

Because I was animating a girl character, they had all these notions of how a girl is "supposed" to walk. Very sexist and stereotypical movement was suggested to "fix" my walk. It was as if they thought the sex of the character should determine the movement instead of the personality of the character dictating the movement. Like it's "wrong" to present a girl walking with confidence and a long stride and a somewhat confrontational personality (all of this will make more sense when you see the animation).
So anyhow, enough of that soap box. For my blocking pass, I submitted it on 3's with a few 1's thrown in there where needed. This has been by far the most complicated setup I've tried to animate thus far (probably biting off more than I should, once again).

After a few weeks of studying between my other assignments, I think I'm actually getting the gist of that overlapping business (a little at least)! I found that I got better results when I was more conservative with the movement on the first tail segment. It actually feels more lively and fluffy and "overlap-y" instead of one big honkin unit like it did in my first Tailor assignment.

Studying Preston Blair's oversized book "How To Animate Film Cartoons" had some great reference of a squirrel tail that really helped me on this.

Class 1 - Session 9

Let's see if I can remember these assignments from oh, so long ago. We got to do a "vanilla walk". Walks are tough! I practically burned a hole through my Animator's Survival Kit studying contacts, breakdowns, and passing positions. I remember going from stepped mode to splines and just freaking out a bit on how much time it took to clean this stuff up. I try to find ways to express my sense of humor, even in these little exercises, so I had my Ballie character walking the wrong way with a little zip in his step. Here's the animation (You'll see my first constipated pass and my second pass which I started from scratch): Ballie Vanilla Walk

The Concerned Stu pose was not my most successful pose. It's not that great of a silhouette and not that clear of a read. That's the challenge though. Take a faceless character and emote with just the body.

I also did planning sketches for a 180 degree turn that I never ended up animating. I hit my head on the ceiling jumping up and down in my basement, trying to figure out the weight in the turn. Casualty of animation...

I haven't been filming reference since the very first bouncing ball. Need to start doing that!!!

Siggraph 2005

Okay, I know i'm way behind on my blog here, but bear with me. I will catch up. In the meantime, I just have to report on my first Siggraph experience - Los Angeles, California - Convention Center - July 31 to August 4.

First of all, I have never been on a trip that long by myself. Getting all the arrangements made was a bit daunting, but I pulled through, trying not to think about how much all this was going to be costing. My work wasn't paying for anything, so I was going out on a limb (I thought), doing all this - the full conference pass (more expensive than the limited passes), etc, etc.

Well, it was a 100% worth it. The first event to kick things off was the AnimationMentor.com Birds of a Feather gathering - I had to leave Ed Hooks' Acting for Animators class a little early, but I'm very glad I did. That's where I finally got to meet the people that made all this happen - Bobby BOOM Beck, Carlos Baena, Lleslie Aclaro, Becky McDonald, (Rachel Ito, who I didn't have the pleasure of meeting til later)...

I gotta say, you have never met a guy with a bigger heart than Mr. Bobby. He greeted every single person with a huge bear hug and took the time to put names to faces and spend a few minutes talking with each person as they came through the door. The room was a sea of AnimationMentor T-shirts and was a-buzz with energy. A few of the mentors were there - Jason Schleifer (Dreamworks/PDI), Derek Friesenborg (Sony Animation), Jamy Wheless (ILM, i think), and Kevin Freeman (TD Animator at Sony - he does all our rigs). Rob Coleman of ILM gave an in-person LIVE Q&A - which was spectacular. He was so honest about everything. For example, one thing that sticks out in my mind is how he responded to a question about what it takes to be an animator and he said something like, "A lot of people have the desire, but some just don't have the observational skills." This is so true, and not brought up very often. (When people talk about animation and what it takes, art skills, drawing skills, computer skills ALL get brought up, but the base of animation, the bedrock, is observation and I don't think that core, basic principle gets brought up enough.)

Here's a juicy quote from Rob Coleman: "There will come a day when at the end of a day of animating, you won't remember even touching the computer - it becomes transparent." That's when you know you're animating from the heart, and really getting to the heart of animation.

Anyhow, moving on, after Rob's very inspirational session, all the mentors had a panel Q&A and they talked about how AM (AnimationMentor) has changed them as animators - how even THEIR work has improved and how it has spawned more feedback within their various studios. It was a total lovefest - like a family reunion (although we had all just barely met in person), only fun.

After the meeting proper was over, a lot of us just hung out, got to know each other, talked animation, pitched our latest assignment ideas to each other. It was so incredible to be there and have that kind of interaction with classmates. Then we all headed to the cafeteria and took the place over practically - mentees crowding around Bobby and Carlos, hanging on every word that was coming out of their mouths almost. I imagine it must be exhausting to be asked the same questions you've answered a hundred times already, but they were such good sports and responded to everyone like it was the first time they had ever talked about what it was like working at Pixar, etc...

Since I had the full conference pass, I got to go to the "Courses" which were all very informative. The course on demo reels was good - the main point I took from there was that your REPUTATION is your "invisible resume". It's your most important asset and must be guarded carefully.

AM had a booth at the Job Fair which was just crawling with people. They were meeting with prospective students and also reviewing peoples' demo reels that came by. THAT was a huge education for me - seeing the quality level of work that people had on their demo reels. There was a guy with killer character animation on his reel - I guess it was feature film work, but getting a taste of the competition was a good wakeup call.

I checked out part of Ewan Johnson's presentation on Staging and Composition - he's the head of Layout at Dreamworks/PDI - he showed a lot of examples from their latest film, Madagascar.

Then there was the 2-keg ReelFX/AnimationMentor.com party out in a parking lot across the street from the convention center. Got to know some of my classmates better there. Then we headed en masse over to the Alias Booth to see Bobby Beck and Jason Schleifer present on "Maximizing Your Workflow in Maya". It was quick and dirty, those guys talking at a million miles an hour, gold spewing out of their mouths. Jason broke it down for us with one of the best explanations of how computer animation is done that I've heard: "Select, move, say stay."

That evening I went to the Star Wars retrospective, which was interesting because it showed the evolution of the filmmaking, especially going from stop-motion, motion-control to CG.

That night, however, was one of the highlights of the trip. Thanks to the lovely Rebecca (awesome AM student and now good friend), I got a ticket to the infamous BLUR party at the Henry Ford Theater on Hollywood. Go-go dancers, trapeze silks entertainment, fire jugglers, open bars, great music - it was a night to remember. Bobby, Shawn Kelly (the third AM founder), and Carlos were all there, as was the rest of the AM gang and a lot of AM students. Didn't get to bed til 5:30 am, but it was so worth it. Memories to last a lifetime made that night.

The next morning was another big highlight - I went to the Legacy of Disney presentation which started out with a bunch of Chicken Little stuff, which was very cool. It's great to see CG move towards more cartoony animation. Watching some frame by frame animation was awe-inspiring, seeing the broken joints all the snap they were getting into a medium that has always been criticized for being too stiff and inorganic. CG Animation is finally hitting puberty.

Then Glen Keane got up and spoke about his transition from hand-drawn to CG animation. He showed an animation test he did with John Lasseter (of Pixar) for Where The Wild Things Are that used 3D backgrounds with 2D character animation, much like Keane did for the movie Tarzan. So he's had his head in 3D space for a long while, but always resisted the "CG craze" til some execs asked him this way, "If you could do everything you can do with drawing without a pencil, are you in?" He had to say yes. So now he's directing Disney's upcoming Rapunzel Unbraided. He showed a short clip of the blonde-tressed girl with a squirrel and I couldn't believe my eyes. He had delivered animation Glen Keane, traditional style on a CG character, all rendered like an illustration from a children's book. It gave me the chills and it took me a while to pick my jaw up off the floor.

That's the kind of stuff I want to do. Nuanced, fluid, squashy, stretchy, living, flesh and bone character animation. It would be an amazing experience to learn from Glen Keane, and I hope to get good enough quick enough to work on that film.

After the presentation, I got to meet him. He signed and did a quick sketch of the Beast in my sketchbook. I'll post that and the picture I got with him later. That was such an "adrenaline moment" for me - meeting my biggest animation hero.

Lastly, there was the CGChar event, which had some great animators go through their workflow. AM's Carlos Baena of Pixar went through the suicide jumper shot he animated on The Incredibles. Jason Schleifer went through some of his shots on Madagascar and Andrew Gordon from Pixar also presented on finishing a shot with tons of examples from The Incredibles.

Here's a juicy quote from Andrew: "Animators don't final shots, they surrender them." It's that kind of investment that is the mark of a true animator, I would say.

At the exhibition hall, I wandered around, spending a lot of time at the Disney Booth, where animators were on hand to show you the actual character rigs used in Chicken Little in Maya. Their concept of "broken" rigging was just fascinated and made me wonder why we weren't doing that same sort of thing at AM, but maybe that's down the road. We're still using a very simple setup with not more than several dozen controls, which I am glad for.

Crawl before walk. Milk before meat.

Patience, patience and hard work.

Oh, and I almost forgot about the Electronic Theater and the Animation Theater presentations! Awesome work showcased there, especially 9 from Shane Acker. I saw his post-apocalyptic short at Sundance this year and was happy for him that he won Best of Show at Siggraph. Then I found out that he won the Student Academy Award and that Tim Burton is producing a full-length feature version of the short!! So I guess some times dreams do come true. It's great to see such talent and quality get recognized and exposed like this. I hope to emulate the level of filmmaking Shane has accomplished.

The whole conference was a whirlwind of energy and it could have been easy to get distracted by all the bells and whistles, but the biggest thing Siggraph did for me was to cement my desire to be an animator and strengthen my confidence in AnimationMentor as a school. Being surrounded by and immersed in the animation world for a week and hanging out with the likes of Bobby Beck and my fellow classmates left me with a feeling that I was home - this is where I belong. These are the people I want to work with. This is what I want to spend my time and energy doing.

This is what I want to dedicate my life to.