Animals & Creatures - Session 108

New rig this week - yay!

This guy is a really cool creature that can be animated both as a quad and a biped.

We have to animate him as a quadruped though and I picked an aggressive behavior as my final assignment for this term (we get a pick list  to choose from).

The final assignment is a 5-week assignment (including last weeks planning) and this week we had to turn in the rough blocking pass.

Here's my rough blocking pass:

Animals & Creatures - Session 107

It's been a really hard week, especially timewise, getting all the transitional footwork and the locomotion to a decent level. I've learned tons on this assignment and in particular from Kevins e-critique, but now I'm looking forward to move on to the next assignment. I've chosen to do a shot with the Ogre doing an aggressive behavior. We'll see how that goes :) It's gonna be fun!

Here's the refining pass of the lioness gallop to a stop-assignment:


And here's the planning for the next assignment:

Animals & Creatures - Session 106

Half way through the first term - yay!

Initially I signed up for only the first Animals & Creature class, because I wanted to see if I was able to do the course and working full time at the same time. Time is definitively becoming an issue as the assignments gets more complex and I'm actually at this point, considering not doing the second class right away. We'll see...knowing myself, I'm probably gonna jump into it :) I still have a few more weeks to decided.

As the assignments overlaps with finalizing the previous assignment and planning the next one in one week, I felt that I did not spend enough time planning and studying reference for this weeks assignment and the blocking turned out kinda...not quite there yet. I knew something wasn't quite right, but couldn't figure out what before I had to turn it in.

Ironically, that turned out kind of cool, because Kevin gave me a beyond awesome e-crit with super detailed feedback and I learned tons. Hopefully I'll manage to implement it all and get the shot to a decent level by the end of the week - as well as do the planning for the next assignment.

Here's my blocking of the lioness gallop:

Animals & Creatures - Session 105

It's been a pretty intense week at work wrapping up another Penguin show, but I managed to squeeze in some time to tweak the assignment and plan the next one.

I knew in advance it was going to be hard doing AM and work full time, but it's actually not as bad as I expected - time wise it's a little bit tricky, but energy wise it's still cool. The style of animation is so different from what I'm doing at work, so it's a nice balance that makes me look forward to do both :)

Here's my assignment this week:


And here's the planning for next weeks assignment - I'm gonna try tackle a gallop with a lioness that comes to a complete stop:

Animals & Creatures - Session 104

Wow - one month into the course already!

We have the option to do pretty complicated stuff in the assignments if we want to, but I wanna try to grasp the main concepts before I take on too much. Plenty of opportunity for complexity later.

Awesome lecture this week by Tippet-animator Brian Mendenhall walking us through how he tackle a shot from start to finish and a great Q&A by Kevin, mostly about the importance of a good working environment (unplug!) and taking care of your health.

The learning curve is super steep and I find it crazy hard, but it's sooo cool to be a part of this. After all it is the very first official Animals & Creature class :)

Here's my blocking pass of the housecat assignment this week:

Animals & Creatures - Session 103

Before I started this AM masterclass, I felt like I had an idea of what animation was and that from now on it's just the matter of building on that and keep learning and improve as much as possible within all the aspects (and there's a lot of them - I know) of the art-form.

But now that I'm learning about realistic animals and creatures VFX animation, it's like a whole new branch of the art-form that I know absolutely nothing about - which is so supercool. It's kinda the same feeling I had back in 2006 when I did the main AM course - all this brand new awesome stuff to learn. It' still scary, but not as scary as back then though :)

My mentor, Kevin Koch, is fantastic. Every single e-crit for each of the students in the class is like a lecture in it self. He really takes the time to analyze our references and point out what it is important to focus on for each of us. Pure gold!

One thing I really feel sad about is the lack of time to interact more with my classmates. It was such a huge part of the AM experience for me last time and I made some fantastic friends. This time I'm working full time as I'm doing Animation Mentor and getting all the info in the lectures, doing the assignments, watching e-crits etc etc takes a lot of time, but I sincerely hope that there will be time to get to know some of my classmates as we go through the course.

Now we're starting our first multi-week assignment. I wanna try to do a house cat starting from a still position, accelerate and then come to a stop. I think it's gonna be challenging to get the right weight into a fairly light animal like a house cat and make it feel real. We'll see how it goes :)

Here's my planning for my house cat walk:

And here's the revision of last weeks assignment:

Animals & Creatures - Session 102

Second week of the Animal & Creature Masterclass and we're starting to animate quadruped walks - which is crazy hard :)

Most of the week went by studying reference and trying to figure out an effective workflow. To find an efficient way to animate a quad cycle, I animated 4 or 5 cycles (rough blocking passes) with different approaches and eventually found a way to do it that I felt comfortable with. Still hard to get a decent result though :)

Here's my assignment this week:

Animals & Creatures - Session 101

Finally, after a couple of months of waiting, the Animation Mentor Animals & Creatures Masterclass has started. I'm superexcited about this and I'm really looking forward to dive into the world of VFX animation.

I couldn't be more happy with my mentor. Kevin Koch is an animation veteran with more than 14 years in the industry and with extensive experience in both traditional and CG animation (Spirit, Shrek 2, Madagascar among others)

For the first week, we had to draw animals, which freaks me out a little bit. I feel that I totally suck at drawing and other than simple stickmen for my thumbnails, I can't seem to get any kind of decent stuff out of a pencil. But an assignment is an assignment, so here it is.

Kevin gave some really nice tips on drawing animals though, so hopefully this will improve as I move on with the class.

We also had to upload a couple of poses with the cat rig they have given us. Here's my poses.

Apologies, Penguins and Animation Mentor

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. It's been a few busy months, both work-wise and personally - all good stuff though, just super busy.

First I wanna point to a few really good blogs, On Animation, Spungella and Animators Resource are all super great sites that keeps a sharp eye on whats going on in the animation world. Stop by any of these sites and you won't miss a thing.

The first episode of The Penguins of Madagascar that I worked on, Love Hurts, has already aired on Nick in the US - I just stepped in the last week of production and did some quick fixes on a few shots, but the next one that I have my own shots in, Operation Break-Speare, gonna air Saturday March 19 (On Nick in the US). Make sure to check it out - It's funny stuff :)

I'm still having a blast working on the show and I think you'll have to search long and hard to find such a playful, crazy awesome environment and great collection of people that we have at Oktobor Animation Studio. The place rocks big time!

Aaaaand...in one week it's back to school for me - The Animation Mentor Masterclass: Animals & Creatures is starting on March 28.

I'm super excited to get back to what started this animation craziness for me. It's been a joyride ever since I started AM back in January 2006 and I can't wait to get going again!

I'll keep my blog updated throughout the masterclass.

Cars 2 Sneak Peak

Puss in Boots Trailer

New Kung Fu Panda 2 Trailer

One on One with Bobby Beck and Carlos Baena

Another Look Inside Pixar

Kung Fu Panda 2 - Super Bowl Spot

First 2 Minutes of Rio

<br/><a href="http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/rio-exclusive-films-first-two-minutes/5eq4owv?from=sp&src=v5:embed:&fg=sharenoembed" target="_new"title="'Rio' Exclusive: Film's First Two Minutes">Video: 'Rio' Exclusive: Film's First Two Minutes</a>

Glen Keane Draws Rapunzel

Lost Generation

Steven Spielberg Admires Animators (1978)

Back to Animation Mentor!

I'm superduper excited!! It didn't take much considering to decide to sign up when AM announced the new Masterclass: Animals & Creatures earlier this week.

I've mostly been doing non-vfx type of animation so far, and even though I have explored some quadrupeds, I haven't really spent much time on animation that is meant to co-exist with live action.

It's gonna be superawesome to get back to where it all started for me about 5 years ago, at the school bench at Animation Mentor. Can't wait to get started in March.

GET MORE INFO ABOUT THE MASTERCLASS HERE!