Refrence Masterpeice

Today I'm staring my bouncing ball assignment for this week. I had an idea of what I wanted to do but to make sure it was right I decided to go shoot some video refrence of a soccer ball bouncing up and down and against a wall. Unfortunaly I have misplaced my Premier key so I decided to use the video software that came with the camera. So I opened up the software and captured the footage of the camera easy as you like, but then when I opened the file to take a look I found that the package had put in a few artistic liberties with my refrence material. So now I have a refence video which includes a soft romantic soundtrack and my footage how now been rearranged into 4 second clips with disolves inbetween so all my shots are cut short!!

Roaming Mentor

This week I was lucky enough to get comments on my pose by one of the schools roaming mentors!! It was so cool I got my work looked at by Jamy Wheless who works at ILM's and worked on a couple of character you may have heard of........hmmm who where they again, ah yes that’s right Yoda and General Grievous!! I dunno about you but I'm geeking out!!
He only had one item for me to fix and that was to smooth out the spine so I was damn happy about that and he was totaly right that little tweak made a huge difference. He also said he liked my back foot bend which unfortunately I can take credit for because my brother gave me some sweet ideas to get the feet and legs looking spot on.
I should also say that other class mates have been great at giving feedback and ideas and I to have been out there looking at peoples work and seeing if I can give any good suggestions. I think this is one of the great things about the school, the way that we use the other people in our class for support and ideas, I think in the end it will up pushing is all further!!

Q&A

Friday was anouther awsome Q&A with Matt!! I can honestly say I have never in my life been so excited to go to class!! In the session Matt whent over the 12 animation princples which we had been givin earlier in the week (had to hang he list up behind my monitor cause I can't remember them all yet :P) Even though I have read about the 12 princples before it was nice to have some one talk about them because every time you read or hear someone elses view on it there is always the chance that something will really click in your mind. I'm excited to try and put them into practice next week when we get our first animtion assignment!! I must admit my attempts of animating in uni where fairly restrained and ended up turning into close shots of talking heads because I had no idea what to do. Still I learnt alot from doing it worng and hopefully that benifit me during the next 18 months!!

Posing Stu

After going out and doing some observational sketches I jumped into Maya to try and pose Stu. I found it kind of daunting to have a little figure just standing there with his arms out looking as lifeless and uninspiring as possible and you look at it and go right I have to make it look like it's alive and convincing that there is no doubt to what Stu is doing. It's really quite fascinating as you begin to bend and mould him into position because just the right tilt of the head or arm can really make him come alive and then on the other hand if you tweak something the wrong way even the smallest detail it can throw the whole thing off and drain the life right out of it.