Film Time!

This is it; That magical time of year when I go into my cave and don't come out until April. My storyboards for this year's film are almost done, to the point where I can tell pretty much what all the shots in my film are going to be. Now is the time to begin planning how I will complete this massive accomplishment in the few short months that I have. So I thought I would share my production schedule:

These two sheets are what a film looks like to me before the first drawing has even begun.  One is a calendar letting me know what days I have to do each shot, and the other is a shot breakdown, letting me know what pieces of animation there are to do in each shot.

I scheduled my shots from most difficult to least difficult in my calendar.  The red areas are vacation time when I will not be working as much on my film.  I plan to have all of my animation done by the time spring break rolls around, and after that I will spend all of April fine-tuning, coloring, and fixing things that do not work.

All the red stuff in my shot breakdown indicates things that have not been worked on at all, which at this point is everything. When I do some work I change it to yellow, and when I consider it finished, I change it to green. By the end of April, everything red should be green.

I blurred out the descriptions to keep my film a surprise

So that's it!  Look forward to my next film, coming in April...

Shape-Shifter

So first semester is now over and it is time for the much needed winter break. Here is the current progress on my model, next semester we go into rigging. For our final exam we had to do three blend shapes with our models: a blink, a mouth open, and one of our choice (mine is a brow up, and I got to learn how to do a wrap to get the eyebrow geometry to follow the facial geometry). Before the next semester begins I have to straighten the character's legs out because that makes it easier to rig.

UPDATE 03/21/11 - I straightened out the character's legs.

I am going to miss this class, Dan Platt was a really awesome teacher and I definitely learned a lot.

HOVER OVER THE IMAGE TO ROTATE THE MODEL

Invisible Dragons

This is my last assignment for the semester in Greg Griffith's CG animation class. Also, I modeled the sword.

Timing and Space-ing

For this week's animation assignment we were assigned two random words to incorporate into a scene, and we were encouraged to use a character from our films. My words were 'quick' and 'glossy'. This is the current design of one of my film characters, though it may change, but it was fun to animate. I am also experimenting with the coloring workflow I will use in my final film, and seeing what kind of look I can get from my rough, non-cleaned up drawings.

Figure Drawings

Here are today's best. Our teacher, Dave Lebow, gave us some toned paper that we could use if we wanted, so I went ahead and used it. Here they are:

(Long poses are rare for our class.  This one was 50 minutes.)

Wonky Monkey Walking

This week's animation assignment was the same as last week, but this time adding arms to the equation.  I chose to animate my sister, oops I mean a monkey.  I had to rush this one in order to meet the deadline, but there are still things I like about it.

Figure Drawings

Here's the best from today's class>>>

 

A Striking Scenario

This is my latest work for my CG animation class. The assignment was to bring an audio clip with no dialogue and create a scene around that, and also to have the character interact with some object. I might have spent as much time on the lighting and render settings as I did on the animation, but I still think it came out okay. Also this is the first time I've added the feature to enable audio on one of my tests. Check it out>>>

Walking with the Dinosaurs

This week's animation assignment: Animate a walk cycle with a biped character with no arms (I cheated and gave him tiny useless arms).

A Model Citizen

Here's a quick update of the progress on my model for my character construction class.  I added nostrils, ears, eyebrows, teeth and gums, a tongue, mouthbag and eye sockets, hands, more eye detail, and new boots.  Now the model is completely water tight, and still 100% quads. Next I have to add the clothes, and begin to finesse the details with finer sculpting. Also the materials I put on are only temporary to give an idea of the color until we unwrap the UV's in a later class.

Things are Going Swimmingly

 The Assignment for this week's animation class was to animate a two-shot scene where a biped character dives into something.  I'm not too thrilled with the way this turned out, but deadlines are deadlines.  Here it is:

Figure Drawings

Here are my best drawings from today's class >>>

Super Sack!

This week in Traditional Animation the assignment was to animate a flour sack with a cape that interacts somehow with a box. I also played with it in After Effects a little bit, adding the shadow, and what I'm calling the 101 Dalmatians line effect. Here it is >>>

Supermodel

This is the character I am building for now in my Advanced CG Character Construction class. I just finished laying down the basic structure for the head, mouth and eyes. In later classes we will be adding the ears, hands, and clothes, and also sculpt the whole thing a lot more, but for now I think he is starting to look pretty good. The edge loops are in all the right places on his face, and he is 100% quads (no triangles, no polygons with 5 or more sides, it's good for deforming textures for animation).  I still can't believe I'm doing this mostly on my own. The teacher for this class is really amazing. This is one of my favorite classes!

HEY BABY, YOU LIKE MY TOPOLOGY?

(okay not the greatest character design, but it's something for now.)

Raising the Bar

Here's some slightly wonky CG animation that I did recently in my CG animation class. The assignment was to do some physical activity with the character model, named Blake. I did a test that allowed me to experiment with the FK/IK switches on the character's hands, which I had never used before.

You Push My Buttons

This week in Flash Web Design we had to do a project with Coraline where we created a button to turn her eyes into buttons and another button to change them back. (ProTip: The button is on her tongue.) This is also the first time I have done anything playing with objects following the mouse orientation in Flash.

Inbetween Slayer

This week in animation we were assigned to inbetween drawings we got of the front, back, side and three-quarter views of Dirk the Daring from Don Bluth's hit arcade game, Dragon Slayer. So every other drawing you see is mine. This was a pretty technical and boring assignment, but good exercise.

Figure Drawings

Here are today's best drawings >>>

Le Sac de Farine

This week in animation class we had the infamous 'animate a flour sack' assignment. Here's mine >>>

Girl Power

This week's assignment in Flash Web Design was to animate a scene in Flash using a made up PowerPuff Girls character. While I don't usually like animating in Flash, I did actually have fun with this assignment.

Figure Drawings

I felt like I had a good drawing day today in figure drawing. Here are my favorites >>>

 

Box Building 101

Today's animation assignment was to animate an unfolded box shape that puts itself together.

Story Vignette

This is from the story vignette assignment in my Story III class. We selected a random person, place, and thing out of a bag and then we had to make a three panel story out of the words. I got singing cowboy, Victorian house in San Fransisco, and ice cream cone.

The Answer is Blowing in the Wind

This was the homework assignment from today's animation class. A leaf blowing in the wind does at least two arcs with different timing and comes to rest on the ground.

Flash-back: 1988

We did two self portraits in my Flash Web Design class to demonstrate painterly lines vs. vector lines.  Though this was an interesting exercise, I don't recommend ever drawing in flash if you can avoid it.  As a side note, the only pictures of myself I had on me happened to be kid pictures, so these come from a photo of my five year old self.  Check 'em out>>>
[P.S. These are SWF's so you can right-click (ctrl-click on mac) and zoom in to see more detail]
Painterly

Vectorly

Can you tell which took longer?

Figure Drawings

Here are my favorite figure drawings from today's class.

LAYOUT - Underwater Scene with a Sunken Ship and an Octopus

This is my Layout homework for this Monday.  Dan likes things simple, so I have a feeling he won't like this one, but I like it.

Back to Animation Basics

We did some bouncing balls today in Traditional Animation III, and we focused on spacing and how it affects weight. So take a look at my balls>>>

First Day Back @ Figure Drawing

These are my favorite drawings from today.  It was hard because I was down to the last of my supplies from last year.  I will go to the art store this weekend though!