Struggling with Finessing and New Favorite Movie Contender

I'm having a bit of trouble finishing the work I need to get done for my shot this week. I keep hitting procrastination and misinspiration. I think the best thing to do is go in via arcs one by one. I'm going to take a break now and get back to it this evening.

But in terms of generalised inspiration I saw Horton Hears a Who last night (albeit in Italian - Orotone e il Mondo dei Chi) and I absolutely loved it. It was fantastic. Great story, characters acting and the animation was super exaggerated and fun. Apparently 22 graduates from AM worked on it so that's something to aspire to.

In terms of aspirations, jobs and the like, news has it that my phone's been ringing off the hook with interviews and offers recently. I don't know what it is... spring fever? Anyhow, starting a stage on the 5th of May and looking forward to it.

House Hunting and Other Hunting

Fabri and I have been looking at apartments lately, on a whim really to see what's out there and if we'd be willing to buy. So far we've seen alot that we like but every place has a catch. One's too expensive, one's too far from public transport, one opens up onto the garbage disposal. i guess with patience we'll find what's right for us.

I'm meant to be starting a stage this week at a post production company but I haven't heard back from the boss since last week. I uess I just have to truck along and see what happens. I had a phone call for some other work last night but it was from a client who is pretty unreliable and always contacts me at the last minute.

It's been pretty rainy lately, but I'm not letting it get me down. I'm too busy to be sad about anything and anyhow, things seem to be going great!

I'm working on a face in Maya for animation cause I need to get my skill-set back up if I want to have a job. Here's the progres after a few days on it. Slowly coming along and definately better than anything I've done previously. I'm following the workfolow of Jason Osipa as in his book 'Stop Staring'. Hopefully it'll turn out pretty decent.

In terms of the Cola assignment, I'm working on simplifing the blocking and getting everything nice and clean for my next upload. Dana said I need to simplify and I'm finding it easier said than done. We talked about it a bit more in the live Q&A yesterday and I thnk I'm getting the hang of it. I've gone into splining cause I feel I can understand what's goign to happen better from there. Hopefully everythign seems to polish up nice.

Week 3 - Coke Machine

Things are going well so far with my first assignment for acting. I had struggled the first week with the video reference and getting all my ideas to fit into the allocated timing. Blocking is done now and I'm heading into refining the blocking but I'd like to head what my mentor Dana Boadway has to say about what I've got so far first.

Well, I'm not going to feel bad that I'm a bad blogger. I have other things to do. Most of them relating to animation anyhow. I'm currently reading 'Timing for Animation' by Harold Whitaker and John Halas and listening to Clay Kaytis' Animation Podcast on my ipod. I'd really like to get a copy of Desmond Morris' Manwatching, but it's out of print and quite costly. I found used ones on amazon, but I haven't got the money right now and I guess it's best to read one book at a time.

Inproving at Animation Failing as a Blogger

I know just look at my other blog to see how bad I am at this. Class 3 has begun now and I didn0t even update on class2 in all this time! Dimos was a fantastic mentor and i got over some hurdles with planning and blocking. Now I have Dana Boadway as my new mentor and am already immersed int he 2nd week of my first project. Here's what I have so far: It still needs work during the blocking pass but I'm waiting for feedback from my peers on the site. I'm feeling pretty good about the acting so far though I did struggle with my video reference last week.

Months and Months!

Well, I'm just awful. Since I've been gone I've been to Canada, India and got married. What kind of unreliable blogger goes off and does all that without an update? Halfa year has gone by.

Okay. Montreal and New York at christmastime was awsome. Fabri's whole family came along and it snowed and we saw all the sites and did loads of shopping and eating and hanging out.

The wedding was last month and I still haven't even gotten around to talking to my friends yet and telling them all about it. It's cause I'm always so busy with the next thing. Which at the moment is Animation Mnetor again, finding a job and an apartment. Anyhow, the wedding was really lovely. I wasn't stressed at all during the day and I thourally enjoyed myself. I wouldn't change a thing except having more of my girlfriends there but that wasn't in my hands anyhow. It turns out the place we had the wedding was Sofia Loren's old house. Crazy stuff. Small world too cause my mom's friend ran into her at the airport on the way back from the wedding and that's how we found out.

India was crazy. A mishmash of colours, sounds sites and smells. There were animals everywhere and people so so so many people. It really was a wonderful adventure. We met some great people too; our driver and the folks in the little villages. here's where we went:


When I get the photos I should post them and then it'll inspire me for more details. We've been looking at apartments to buy and have seen some interesting options but I'm concerned about finding the money for the deposit. i guess we have to go through the process of finding one we like enough first. The money is somewhere!

That's all for now and I hope not for the next 6 months! I have animation stuff to get back to and other things going on and I don't want to forget to eat lunch.

Terry Fox Hope Run

I can't believe what's happened to me recently! I've become a bit of a sports buff! ately I have been feeling pretty alright so I started going tot he gym every day. Then I felt even better and started pushing myself harder and harder. There's this one trainer there who laughs at me when I can't do that last situp and so I try to go further and further (to avoid the laughter of course!) Anyhow, I'm off track now...

So one day I was at the gym and I saw this poster for the Terry Fox Hope Run in Milan in a few weeks time and before I knew it and before I could stop myself I had signed up! I didn't even know how many kilometers it was! And certainly with my knees I wouldn't be able to run it right?

But it's a good cause... a great cause...so I signed up and asked everyone I know for donations or to run with me. And a few said they'd run and a few gave their donations. In the end no one joined me that sunday but I finished the 5k in 46 minutes, and I raised €100 which I put towards Cancer research.

Not too shabby.

Hip & London

I went to London a couple weeks back with Ashley to catch up with friends and see the Tragically Hip. The concert was great. We managed to get backstage and meet Paul Langlois.

Saturday we went to Chelsea to meet Jason and ended up going clubbing at Mahiki. Nice place. I haven't danced like that in ages. I love going out with Jason cause he's got great taste of places and we like the same type of evening.

I also caught up with Lana and met her daughter Mila. The girl is so pretty and independant and adorable. Very outgoing and quite a handful, but she seems to be happy to go out for coffee with mum when she meets friends.

We stayed at Lindsay's place so I finally got to meet Adam and caught up with them too. Lindsay's off on a trip around the world soon. Very exciting. Her apartment was full of gadgets and awsome travel goodies.

Michelle and I caught up for brunch in Notting Hill. Lucky me that almost everyone was in town. Missed Simone and Adrian though cause they were off getting married in Australia. Nice! I came back feeling refreshed and invigorated and missing London terribly.

Class 2 Begins!

Hey guys, I have Dimos Vrysellas as my mentor this term! I'm psyched! he's worked on films such as, "The Prince of Egypt", "The Road to El Dorado", "Spirit, Stallion of the Cimarron","Sinbad and the Legend of the Seven Seas" and "Shark Tale".

It's 4:22am here and he's doing a demo right now in the Q&A. Not so cool it's 4:20am, but soooo cool getting a demo this early in the course!

Class 1 is Done!

Howdy! Class 1 wrapped up this week with a look at walks with weight. It was a helpful lecture and I think I'll be able to apply the new concepts first thing in Class 2. It's amazing how fast it went and how much we learnt in such a short period of time. When I look back now at animations I did before AM my face turns all rosy-red, I tilt my head and eyes towards the floor, slightly to the left, my shoulders are up and my arms grasped behind my back at the waist and I point my toes inwards. Hahaha... you see? I'm describing a pose for an emotion.

Enjoy the compilation film and see you in a few weeks for the start of Class 2!

Gets carried away...

Well, I can see now how it's so hard to mantain a blog when you're busy doing a million things at once. Finally I have a minute to update you all on my progress at AM. Things are going great... we're in our 4th week of walk cycles and learning lots at the moment about hip rotations and balance and shifting of the weight.

I've posted the revision of my Vanilla walk I did a few classes back. I haven't gotten any further critique on it yet so I don't know if it's perfect yet, but I'm feeling good about it. Thought that could change cause everytime I look at any of my work a few days later or after a new lesson I want to go back and correct it. Also, here's a few of my more recent Stu poses:

Cricket for Amatures

Babysitting is tough but I learnt how to play cricket (well, easy cricket actually... no running thank g-d!!) I finished with 22 points... Alessandro (the kid I'm looking after) got 145 points and Thomas (his friend) got 120... but it was his first time.

22 is a pathetic score. Hopefully they think I was letting them win.

Hello! Long time!

Hey there... started my babysitting job yesterday. Alessandro is so sweet... but he likes to play ball in the house so I should probably get him to stop that before he breaks anything. I have to stay 4 nights next week... but the extra pay is welcome.

We're off to Rome this weekend to get some paperwork and to see Fabri's sister. It's going to be nice cause I haven't been in Rome in ages and never with Fabri. Looking forward to our adventure.

Not too much new to report. Animation mentor is on week 10 so I've got only 2 more to go for this term. It's going great!

I made this silly avatar on Yahoo... hope ya like it.

How to add rotation controls to the pendulum platform in Assignment 6

Step 1: Right click on the channel box so that there is the drop down seen here.


Step 2: Select Channel Control from the list - the channel control window will open



Step 3: Scroll down the list and find rotateX, rotateY and rotateZ and click the move button on the right.



Step 4: Click close... you now have rotation controls on the pendulum rig. Even if I'm not sure we were supposed to break it in this way.




Happy rotating!!

Week 6 - Overlapping Action

Just got back my critique for the week 5 obstacle course assignment and I'm going to post that up when I do the revisions.

This week we're looking at overlapping action, drag, follow through and successive breaking of joints. We've put aside the bouncing ball for the moment to look at a pendulum's motion when driven by a platform above it. I think I understand the concepts pretty well, but it's going to take a bit of time and experimentation before I build up some confidence on how to use them.

I just finished looking at Bobby Beck's website and blog. It's awesome how much positivity everyone surrounding AM exudes. Bobby's sight just seems to scream total contentment, gratitude and generosity. But then I guess those are the characteristics you should have if you're going to open up a school that works as well as this one does. Surely frustration, capriciousness and greediness wouldn't make for the best learning environment. (although that seems to be a pretty good description of some other, best left unnamed institutions I've studied at.)

I'm trying to organise a meeting between the Milanese students of AM. There are a few others out there and I think it'd be a great thing if we were to catch up. As it's august, there's not many people around though and so far we've all been to busy working on our assignments and successively off on vacations that the opportunity hasn't presented itself. Maybe we can try for Thursday... that'd be cool.

This week my Q&A is on Tuesday rather than Wednesday so I have to get going on the experimentation otherwise I'll miss the opportunity to ask Chris anything I didn't understand. I'll keep you posted on how it's going!

Anecdote: On Sat I decided to sit in on an extra Q&A with Mark Pudleiner who's been working as an animator since the 1980's starting with a personal favorite The Care Bears Movie... and more recently The Robinsons... which I loved. Anyhow... I was just listening in and cooking dinner at the same time and didn't have headphones, just speakers and the mic wasn't plugged in and all of a sudden Mark says 'Okay now let's hear from Jessica Herman' and I'm all flabbergasted and in a fret cause I'm checking if I even have pants on (which I did) and plugging in headphones and the mic and turning on the lights in the room and wow... suddenly the 'LIVE' part of Live Q&A really had a whole new meaning. Mental note: work on telling of anecdotes.

I Just Flew In From Berlin and Boy are My Arms Tired

Heya! We just got back on Sat from our gigantic European roadtrip. Europe sure is a big country. No, really, we hit Austria, Switzerland, France and loads of Germany. It was really great seeing all that stuff. I wouldn't have thought it before I went, but I was most surprised by the fact that it seems like they just finished last week rebuilding Germany from the mess there was there in WWII. Really, they're putting back up all the monuments and churches and citys, alot of them exactly as they were.

I'll post some photos when Fabri gets around to getting them to me... in the meantime here was our route:


VIEW THE ROUTE IN GOOGLE MAPS

Weeks 3&4 - Bouncing Balls

Heya! So much has happened since I started AM. For the last 2 weeks we've been working on our bouncing balls assignments, but I've been away on my summer holiday and getting the work done in the wee hours of the morning via the laptop and oftenly overpriced wireless connections.

So we had to submit 2 bouncing balls yesterday... One being heavy and the other light. I think my downstairs neighbours were beginning to freak out cause of all the golf balls, softballs and gummy balls bouncing on their heads, but they didn't come up to yell at me so that's great! Anyways, I found out that even doing the video reference is fun.

Week 2 - Shawn Kelly & Live Q&A

Had a Q&A with Shawn Kelly today and it was totally cool. What a cool cool guy. The Q&A started at 6:30am, and was supposed to run an hour, but in the end he talked with us until 9am... man... that's dedication! he even gave us a tour of the stuff that surrounds his desk. Neat!

Biggest piece of advice was to make sure we learn how to take and give critique, and develop a tough outer skin. Oh, and to have lots of fun!

My assignment for the week is to go out to a public place and to draw people. I then have to pose the stu character in one of the poses I got from the observation drawings. I was looking at the syllabus and am a bit nervous cause later on in the term we have to finds a pose for EXHAUSTION, DEVESTATION, EXCITEMENT etc. and when i try to think of poses that represent those feelings I start to feel overwhelmed and confused. I'm sure I need to work more on my understanding of body language and acting. It'll come in time though.

I think I'm going to head off to the gym for that and get 2 things done at once. That way I can observe really active poses for the assignment as well as getting in a workout. It's all about balance right?

Updates & New Blogs

Have a look at the new Animation Mentor related blog by going to http://qwertyjuiceam.blogspot.com I decided to open up a new blog for that stuff cause maybe it's not as interesting to alot of people. (of course, what'0s here isn't interesting either, but on a different level of disinterest.

I've also created a wedding planning blog, but I'm only going to be giving out the URL to that one to people I know. If you want that URL, let me know and I'll decide if I know you.

We're off for a secret holiday destination for my birthday tomorrow. It's a surprise from Fabri and I have no idea where we're going! So exciting, but I have no idea what to pack!

Week 1 at Animation Mentor

Animation Mentor started Monday and I'm already feeling great about it.

My mentor is CHRIS CHUA. He used to work for PDI, Rough Draft, Rhythm and Hues, and Dreamworks Animation and studied animation at CalArts. He worked on Shark's Tale and Flushed Away while at Dreamworks. I met with him for the first time in the weekly Q&A on Wednsday. There were quite a few technical he still got our hears churning.

I went out and bought a new sketchbook (and a vintage 2nd-hand leather bag to carry it in) in honour of the start of classes. Chris said that we chould be drawing all the time. The drawings don't ahve to even be good, but that we should just practice practice practice. I managed to get some rough sketches in while on the tram yesterday, but nothing which stands out too strongly. This one here is a woman reading the paper.

No assignment for this first week except to introduce ourselves to the rest of the class and Chris, fill in the profile, upload a video diary entry (mine is pathetic I should change it), and participate in the scavenger hunt.

I've been watching everything the site has to offer. Tons of info and alot of help. I especially liked the segment on 2D animation. Everything is starting to make sense. And I'm also learning why my attempts at learning this stuff went so badly in the past.

I'm almost half-way throogh Disney's Illusion of Life. It's fascinating. WALT DISNEY is now almost my greatest hero.