Monday, November 14, 2005

Fellow Students of AM get hired by Disney!

So there are 2 students of Animation Mentor that recently got hired by Disney! They are Anthea and Rebecca from class 3! (I don't want to post any last names without them knowing it) Congratulations ladies! In case any of you are wondering, class 3 is one class ahead of the class I am in. Paul, who was in my class last term, but had a different mentor, is now at Blue Sky working on Ice Age 2!

PIXAR animators blog!

So there's a new blog out that most of you probably already know about. The name of it is Spline Doctors. Those of you that aren't character animators, or bad character animators that don't know what the graph editor is, you might be wondering why they call themselves spline doctors. My guess is from the extensive use of the splines in the graph editor during the clean up process of character animation in the computer. All of the animators that created this blog teach at The Academy of Art University, which seems like a very nice school! Stephen Gregory, one of the spline doctors, was my mentor last term at Animation Mentor and was a very good teacher. Since having him, I know a bit about his workflow method and he is definitely graph editor friendly.

If you go to splinedoctors.com you can find a list of thier students from AAU, which have some AWESOME demo reels to check out! One person's demo reel that I seem to be watching almost daily now is Nick Rasario's! His work is very inspiring!

My mentor for this term!

If anyone was curious about who my mentor is for this term, it is Brett Coderre from PIXAR! He's a great mentor and has been really pushing the idea of seperating actions! It's been something that not a lot of other mentors seem to be talking about but I find very important. It seems that when I mention this subject to other students that are studying character animation nod and say they know about it but when I view their work they seem to really miss the mark. (bear in mind that I'm sure that I am guilty of doing that very thing with many different parts of animation) My suggestion would be to pop in a PIXAR movie and frame by frame their work and see how they are moving the different parts of the body at different times. Everything shouldn't move at the same time!

Here's a bit about Brett Coderre!

Brett has been working with PIXAR Animation Studios since A Bug's Life. He is currently working on PIXARS 2006 CARS. Brett won The Visual Effects Society Award for Oustanding Character Animation with his fantastic work on Finding Nemo, for the Dory Whale speaking scenes.

Ok, Ok! So I haven't updated.

Alright, so I didn't put up my work from last term. Sorry guys. One thing you must all know about character animators is that once we so-call "finish" a piece, we always see many improvements that need to be made! As far as last term assignments they were mainly foundation assignments and nothing really there demo reel wise so I don't really think it would be worth the time to really go in and polish them up and because of that, I don't plan on posting them. I'm really only posting this now that I see some of my fellow AM classmates seem to be starting come here, lol.

So I don't think I'm going to put up my work from last term but here's something that may tide you over. I am currently working on a four emotion pose test and am in the middle of cleaning up a heavy push assignment. There are quite a few things in it that I need to tend to so it's not a finished piece by any means!

HEAVY PUSH ASSIGNMENT


Any crits and comments are always welcome!