The Timing of Things and Taxes

kr_402_07.mov (QT, H.264, 2.3MB)

The changes for this week are subtle. I changed an "S" shape here, adjusted some eyelids there, tweaked an eye position. It might seem the changes were simple and quick, but it did take a good amount of time. I spent a lot of time thinking about what needed to be done, to get it from there to here, and that way I knew what should happen, where to spend most of the time. This will be the final week on it. I don't know why the new H.264 codec made my playblast so "faded" looking. Kinda annoying. Probably a Mac thing, different gamma and all. Generally I don't like compressors to do anything to my image unless I tell them to. DivX did something similar a few versions ago and it was also a nuisance (inexcusably made everything darker). Maybe there's a new checkbox I don't know about yet ("Make Video Brighter For No Reason").

So, not speaking of daily life outside of AnimationMentor assignments, my mom is adjusting to new medicines again. She needed a change because, though she was doing very well during the beginning of our last break between classes, right when the new semester started my mom's condition began to worsen. I came very close, closer than before, to deciding to drop AM. I just couldn't believe the timing...she'd been ok all that time then BAM! Right when I needed to start focusing on school.

So with my mom's many needs my dad often has to just wait patiently before I can help him with anything. He needs a new hearing aid. I was finally able to get him to an audiologist a coupla weeks ago, which is the first step. Next I have to go through a (thankfully-) short list of Medi-Cal providers to find out how this all works. He got his current hearing aid before I was taking care of him and my mom and, even though he qualified for Medi-Cal, he paid for it out of his own pocket. Ouch. The one he has now is like ten years old, too and hopefully one with newer technology will help him. But anyone who's ever dealt with Medi-Cal can tell you it's sometimes a long, overly-complicated process to use your benefits.

Alas, my dad has to wait some more. I have an even more pressing, long-running issue of my own. I am an IHSS care-provider with a "consumer" (the person I provide care for, my mom) who is unable to meet her monthly "share of cost", the amount mandated by insanely unrealistic laws that she is required to pay to me before the County/State program pays anything. There's no possible way she could pay the amount they require, not even close, and still have enough to pay her rent and utilities and food. So part of my income through the IHSS program is left unpaid...the largest part, in fact. This results in an alarming situation. The other details are not important but what it means is that, unless I can find some way around it, I am expected to pay taxes based on an income figure (on paper only!!) of more than ten times the pay I actually receive!! How do you like them apples? (And by apples I mean "pooh".)

So now I am on a quest to find the person or group that is going to help me out of this tax nightmare. My union representative was sympathetic but little help, steering me elsewhere. There is an IHSS tax seminar I will attend near the end of the month. Hopefully I can get some answers. I'm sure there are other IHSS caregivers in a similar situation all over the State. Oh, my union rep also confirmed that, though I work more than 9 hrs a day and 64 hrs a week with no days off I don't get overtime because of the way home workers are classified by state law. What a crock! Ok, sorry. Enough rant. My point is, I've got a lot to do just to fix things that I shouldn't need to fix! That said, I better get back to it!

He's So Sad

The big trick for this 3-week assignment was to swap out Bishop's head with the more advanced one with all the facial controls. Luckily, the school gave us a Melscript that automated the process. (Big kudos to Taylor Mahoney who also made us a whole Maya shelf of useful tools). Unfortunately, the keyframes for the eyes weren't carried over. At first I was a little worried because my shot had a lot of eye movement, brows and lids doing all kinds of things. I was concerned I might not get through my first pass for the entire shot. Luckily, throwing the keys in there went smoother than I thought and I had plenty of time to spend on it as well. I also came up with process that seemed to flow well.

I decided the eyes in this shot are higher priority than the mouth, so I started there using a "layered" approach. After a couple of lame-o starts, I scrubbed through the original Quicktime movie and put Bishop's eye moves and blinks back in. On a second runthrough I went back and keyed the brows. As I worked I saw some places I wanted to make tweaks to the original, so I put those in as well. Finally, I made another pass putting in most of the phonemes and other mouth shapes. Doing the mouth and brows was made a bit simpler because our Maya Shelf has tools that give us a bunch of presets as a starting point. This was a big help because I was able to quickly try different brow or mouth positions to see what I thought worked best, then just make adjustments as needed. For example, there was no preset for "ER" and besides, it was coming out of a "W" and going into an "S" mouth shape ("worse") , so I fudged one of the presets.

I was trying to work as fast as I could so I employed a technique I'd discovered while doing the two "Jeff Kim 3-Hour Animation Showdowns" I'd done; instead of blocking with "stepped" keys, I cut to the chase and keyed everything with "flat" tangents. I found this to be a more "straight-ahead" approach, though; it worked great for the this because I already knew where my keyes were going to be and what they'd be doing. It's almost like blocking and refining in one step, but I don't think this will work for everything. I'll use it where I can but probably continue to block in stepped for most everything else until I'm really good. I didn't check my file timestamps but I probably spent about 8-12 hours on the shot this week in 2 long sessions (including breaks). Not super fast but ok for now. I was able deliver the shot early Sunday rather than rushing at the last minute.

Though it's clearly not done, it seemed to have come out decent so far. Ike liked it. He even applauded that I'd unified the brow movements with the eyes on my blinks (though I didn't unify eyes/lids/brow in all the places it's necessary). In tonight's Q&A I want to ask Ike how to handle the "lazy eye" that happens because to get the left eye (screen right) to look good at frame 88-ish, I have to point it separately from the other eye and then realign it by 92. There are quite a few other things to fix, too and I'm relieved I had the right amount of time to get it as far as I did. Here's what I turned in Sunday...

kr_401_31_16.mov (QT Sorensen, 4.8MB)

Doesn't Bishop look sad at the end?

Now the hard (FUN) Work Starts

Last night was the first Q&A with my new mentor, Ike Feldman. Since we haven't turned in any assignments yet this first session was just as chance to get acquainted with Ike and learn a bit about the others in our group. Many of us know each other from having the same mentor for earlier classes or seeing each other online. But there are so many students there are still people I've not met even after 3 prior classes. Ike seemed really cool, which is kinda silly to say since we've come to realize all the mentors are cool. And it was fun to be back in a Q&A for the first time in weeks, seeing the other mentees, meeting new ones and BS-ing in the chat window while we're supposed to be listening.

We've been experimenting and testing the new facial controls on our main character, Bishop, and now it's finally time to really get in and start adding the expressions to our shot. There is a huge amount of flexibility built into the controls which is gonna allow us to be quite expressive...even stubtle wtih Bishop's facial expressions if we do it right. I can already tell this is not going to be easy! It's gonna be fun though. Luckily, we're simply adding the facial animation to an existing shot, or it would be beyond insane to get it all done. Final is due in 3 weeks, so I'm wishing everyone in Class 4 good luck and hope to have a bit of luck myself.

Ready Or Not

Animation classes start up again less than 24 hours from now. Holiday break is officially over. My mentor for Class 4 is Ike Feldman, animator at PIXAR. I'm excited to see what we'll learn in our next lecture and the details of our upcoming assignments. I look forward to returning to learning, but I was very glad to have had the long break.

I decided to mostly abstain from animating during the break for a number of reasons. First and foremost is that focusing so intently on school work for the past 9 months meant I had to neglect some other important areas of my personal life. My room and my desk have been a disaster area. Though bills were paid as agreed, I had to keep the details of personal and family bookkeeping to a minimum, so there are some things that hadn't been attended to in a while. (I am responsible for my parents' finances as well as my own, so it can be kinda complicated.) The break afforded me much needed time to take care of these kinds of things that have been hovering incomplete over my head for too long. There are still many things I have to work on, but I got a lot done during the break.

Second, I needed a chance to relax. Well, sort of relax. My life itself is stressful and exhausting a good deal of the time, so removing anything from my plate relieves some of the pressure on the days when things are especially challenging. Not having to worry about finishing an assignment helped a great deal.

The third thing is that I guess I felt like taking a break from animating would give me a fresh start for the coming months. I know that it will be a while before there's another break and, with so many other responsibilities, I thought I'd better focus on other areas while I had the chance.

That said, it wasn't really my first choice to put aside animation. If I wasn't so far behind on other things I would have preferred to just keep right on animating, revisiting and cleaning up past assignments, experimenting with new ideas, practicing. I mean, I do love animating! If my time was my own I surely would not have stopped animating at all during the break. In fact, for the first week of break I was seriously jonesin' for some animatin'. I kept wanting to drop all that other boring stuff and just animate, but there just wasn't time for it. Luckily, this past week I started getting into it again with the help of Jeff Kim's 3-hour "Animation Showdowns". I actually did one of 'em and had a good time. It would have been great to do more, but now class is starting up again and I'll be plenty busy.

One thing all of us Mentees are excited about is the totally revised Version 2 of the AnimationMentor campus! Many of us beta-tested the new site over the past few weeks and it is a huge-normous leap upgrade from the previous one. Wow! What a lot of work that was and awesome great job the AM teAM did getting it all together. As I've mentioned in our own forums, incoming students have no idea how much better they'll have it.