And The Audio Clip Will Be...

Our current multi-week assignment is to animate Bishop doing a line of dialog of our choice from any tv show or movie. Sunday we turned in our 3 or 4 selects so our mentors could help us decide which of them would be best suited for this assignment. The goal was to find a line that has interesting variety of inflection, pauses in the delivery or a change of mood; something that would inspire us when we get into animating the shot. I don't have that many DVDs, but I was able to find some decent clips:

1. Mayor Vaughn, speaking to Chief Brody from Jaws
2. Hooper frustrated with Vaughn, also from Jaws
3. Chandler, worried he's being too picky about dates from Friends
4. Laura speaking to Rob from The Dick Van Dyke Show

Here is an mp3 of all 3 (319k).

I like the subtlety of clip 1, the intensity of 2 and the delivery of 4 makes it my 2nd favorite. But my mentor and many of my AnimationMentor classmates seemed to prefer the clip from Friends, and I agree it is the best of the group, and it will be fun to animate.

My next few tasks will be to break down the dialog into main beats or phrases, figure out operative words which are like accents of the line, and do some sketches to develop ideas for important poses. I'm hoping to borrow a video camera from someone to shoot some reference of myself acting out the shot, too. I might have to just plock down some moo* and buy a MiniDV camera soon. Gotta work fast because after all that I'll have to figure out the frames that each part of the dialog falls on and do a quick blocking pass to turn in Sunday. This is a fun assignment and I think all of us are sooper excited about it!
*moo - kenism, short for moola.

It's Bishop!

The model for the new character we'll be animating in Class 3 was made downloadable end of last week! His name is Bishop and he's our first fully "skinned" character. Some of his rig is identical to Stewie's, but Bishop is a bit more sophisticated. He has controls for opening and closing his mouth and moving his jaw side to side, upper and lower eyelids, pupil and iris dilation, a simple unibrow, neck stretch and 3 actual fingers instead of just 2. In the quick pose I did testing him out, Bish is looking up, perhaps pondering what dialog I will make him act out in the upcoming assignment.

Not Exactly a Break

This past week has been a break between classes at AnimationMentor, a chance to catch up on personal odds and ends, de-stress and get ready for Class 3, Introduction to Acting, which starts Monday. At least that was the idea.

The week started off okay enough. My mom seemed fine on Sunday, well enough she wanted me to take her to the store. Her health problems have gotten a little worse over the past two weeks but Sunday I thought maybe she might be improving again. She had a lot of trouble the rest of the week, though. I never know what to expect. Thursday my parents got into a big argument that I had to break up. Jeez, this is kinda like having kids. I thought everything was settled when I stepped out with a friend later in the afternoon. While I was out, I missed a call from my mom on my cell. When I checked the message she left the first few seconds were all I needed to hear; my mom was frantic and it sounded like she and my dad were arguing again. I told my friend we had to go and ran to the car!

Luckily, when I got home I got my parents calmed down and no one had been physically hurt. But it is clear I might not be able to leave them alone with each other when I go out on errands or such. There's no immediate solution, and it's very likely one of them might have live elsewhere, which sucks. I'll have to start making phone calls Monday, right when classes recommence.

Early this week I also had to stop interacting with a longtime friend whose recent behavior, though primarily supportive, was inadvertently causing me a lot of extra stress that I am not able to deal with right now. The final straw came this week when s/he deliberately caused a rift between me and another person. This is not something I am happy to do--every friend I have is highly valued--but this person's actions were inexcusable and at this time I'm at a loss for any other solution. I don't know if this is a permanent change or not, I just know it was interfering too much with my staying positive with everything that's going on around me.

BBQ @AMHQ

The bbq Saturday at AnimationMentor headquarters was deluxe! It was great to see everybody again (this is the fourth SF area hangout) and meet so many others for the first time...in person! Bobby's wife and mom were there, and it was nice talking to them, I finally met Carlos, Nancy Kato...so many people and mentors made the fest, but with my semi-retarded social skillz I didn't get to everyone. I don't get out much. Plus it was a pretty big crowd! I did get to meet über Disney animator Mark Henn though, and that was sooper cool. I tried chatting in the live Q&A, but I think I was logged in as Luis and no one on the other end knew it was me. The mentor camera was at the other desk. Wish everybody could have been there though! It rocked! Can't wait 'til the next one!

Apparently I've Learned Something!

Like many of my AnimationMentor classmates I often find it a challenge to get homework done by deadline. Doing that freelance job last week did not help, and that was a little too challenging with everything else going on. There's a reason I try to spread out freelance jobs. So sometimes it seems like I'm not progressing as much as I would hope.

Class 2 on body dynamics is winding down and having completed in last week's assignment on time I looked forward to not having any assignment due for this final week. This gave me a chance to revisit my 4 Emotions assignment which I had delivered partly polished. I could have just left well enough alone, since it doesn't affect my grade at this point, but it's a matter of principle. Plus, I hadn't put anything in my Revision slot (in my workspace on AM) in weeks because the main assignment was taking all the time I had, and I wanted something in there for Charles, my mentor, this week.

So I spent several hours last night into early this morning, working on the arms, which I hadn't even animated in one section, counter animating problematic stuff (I had a knee control that was going nuts for some unexplained reason. It was NOT the dreaded "gimbal", this was something esle.), and fine tuning stuff. While it's still what I'd call "In Progress", it's looking much better. I'd post it here except that I ran out of ftp space.

The big thing I discovered from this morning's session is that, apparently, I've learned something during the past 6 months!

I noticed a bit of "overshoot" on Stewie's foot that caused it to go through the floor as it moved from one key to the next. I had Maya's Graph Editor open and amidst the tangle of splines running every which direction I immediately spotted the problem. I could see that the spline for the foot's xRotation "bubbled" up instead of staying flat like it should. Not only that, my first instinct on how to fix it was correct; change the first key tangent to "Flat" instead of "Smooth". Problem solved. 3 or 4 months ago I know I wouldn't have spotted such a problem quite as quickly. Kinda exciting and fun to realize I'm learning, despite the fact that much of it seems to just whiz by. Cool!

Sugar Rush

Is it wrong of me to do this? I've been known to do some"fun" things with foodies, like I never grew out of childhood habits of putting potato chips or Doritos® on sandwiches. Even though I've been an adult for oh, 2 weeks now, it still seems to improve the taste of the sandwich.

My latest food experiment (foodsperiment) involves Rice Kripsies Treats®. Rice Krispies Treats of course, are those delicious snack squares made with Kellog's Rice Krispies®, marshmallows and margarine. You can make your own but I recently found a giant box of 40 pre-packaged bars at Costco. 40! My parents love them after all. (Sometimes my dad eats ice cream or some kind of pastry instead of a regular meal. He's 97.)

I like to eat cereal for breakfast and sometimes I have a nice bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats® with Almonds. Just last week I got a bright idea: Since Rice Krispies Treats are made out of cereal, why not break up one of those squares and toss it in the bowl with the Honey Bunches of Oats? So I tried it and it was delicious! It's my new cereal treat. I know they already have Rice Krispies Treats cereal. I havent tried it but I bet that boxed stuff doesn't have nearly as much sugar! So now I have a new cereal version to add to my morning menu. Oo! I bet this same idea would work great with Reeses® Puffs®!

This week at AM I refined last week's blocking. The assignment was to do 100 frames of Stewie going through a single change of mood/emotion. I had some cool ideas for a "devastated" Stewie, mainly some cool camera stuff, since we're starting to get into lessons about camera use, but I decided I would need more time--to do the assignment as well as more frames. I settled on having Stewie react in jubilation after reading a letter. Not that creative, but all I felt I had time for.

The past two weeks have been extra busy because I've been working on a freelance motion graphics job. I worked on it Wednesday thru Tuesday, which is extremely short to develop a show open, but it turned out okay and the client seemed to love it. Without any changes! When does that ever happen? I got lucky. Oh, crap I just remembered I have to send an invoice!

It's good to have work once in awhile but man, that sure adds to the stress of an already tight schedule. It's enough that I've contemplated dropping AM because I just don't feel I'm putting enough time into it to get the maximum out of it. But geez, when in the future would life be any less complicated than now? I wish I had more time for school, but I'm learning too much to quit.