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: