Class1 / Week 2: Basic Foundations

One of 12 Principles of Animation is "Solid Posing". Without a solid pose any great idea or story can easily get lost in translation, no matter how good the dialogue is. We need to learn to pose our characters in order to convey their emotions properly and create a connection between the audience and the characters in a scene.

Week 2 assignment for Animation Mentor was all about observation and capturing emotions. We had to get out there and observe people, their mannerism, how they walks, how they sit, how they interact with each other, etc. Are they sad, thoughtful or are they excited? As we took mental notes of our observations we also had to do quick sketches of our surroundings. Our goal was to capture their energy, posture, and attitude through a simple gesture. Once we had enough gestures to pick from then we had to choose our favorite one and recreate the pose in Maya using AM's STU rig.  Below you can see my sketches and final assignment after my mentor's revisions.

Here’s are a couple of pointers for gestures and capturing the energy on your poses: 

- Capture the essence of the pose, not the details.

- Think verbs not nouns. Example: If you see someone pushing a box, don't look at the person and think: "the arm goes here and the foot goes there, etc." Instead, think about "pushing" and the forces that are driving the action, think about the line of action and the rhythmic lines that flow through the body.

-Always imagine yourself taking the same pose.

-Line of Action

-Try to use a pen not a pencil. Because you can't erase this will force you to think about your line before putting it down on paper.

I know it's easier said than done but once you get in the habit of sketching everyday, you'll start seeing the line of action and the rhythmic lines that drive the pose more quickly.

For books, they are plenty out there, but these are my favorites:

Force Drawing by Michael Matessi
Simplified Drawing for Animation
Any book from Glenn Vilppu
Gesture Drawing for Animation by Walt Stanchfield
George Bridgman Drawing from Life (This is if you want to learn anatomy)
The illusion of Life from Disney also has a lot of examples on gestures and quick sketches.

That's it, that's my secret! There’s no right or wrong way of sketching so feel free to experiment and decide what works best for you.  Hope it helps! If you need an extra eye on your sketches, let me know. Have a great week!

-Jose

AM Class 1 / Week 1: And My Mentor Is...

I've been so busy lately getting in the groove of managing AM assignments, work and life in general that I completely forgot to update my blog and write about my experience in the first 4 weeks of Class 1 at Animation Mentor.

First day of class was pretty amazing and our Facebook group started a countdown as the time of reopening the AM Campus approached.We actually set a new record in comments in a post, I think we ended up with 150 comments total in less than 5 minutes and my iphone was going crazy with messages from all my classmates. We also had our own little virtual fireworks display just for fun! GOOD TIMES! Such an awesome group! I couldn't be more happier with my graduation class. You guys rock!

Once the AM Campus opened I quick rushed to check who my mentor was. I got Nate Wall from Dreamworks. Yup, That's right! DREAMWORKS! He's currently working on the animated film Turbo and also worked on the recent release Madagascar 3. He also previously worked at Blue Sky Studios on films like Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs and Rio. I'm super excited to have the opportunity to learn from one of the great animators in the industry. Such a humbling experience, to just sit and listen to their stories, talk about their experiences in the animation industry and passing their incredible knowledge down to us. But the most amazing part is that they get to critique our assignments and help us make the most out of them. First week basically consisted of getting familiar with the online campus and watching training videos, so no animation assignments for week 1. Things definitely started to gradually pick up the pace after the first week as you will notice in my next few posts. I'll be posting my assignments for Week 2 & 3 in the next few days to finally catch up on my posts along with some thoughts on my progress, tips that I've learned and my experience so far. 

AM Springboard Progress Reel

Animation Mentor Springboard: DONE!

AM Springboard: Week 9 Basic Step

It's time to move on to Class 1! I'm super excited! Stoked! Thrilled! Jumping up and down and off the wall like an idiot would be a better description! - But you get the point. Springboard is finally over! Had such a great time with my mentor, classmates and learning the animation tools from Maya. And to think we didn't even scratched the surface yet. I still have huge amounts of stuff to learn along the way,  Maya is such a complex piece of software.  I'm also a bit nervous! Remember that feeling of going to college for the first time? Same thing here! We are currently scheduled to start a few weeks from now. In the meantime, I'll try to enjoy the free time with my family and maybe put together a small progress reel with my Springboard assignments.

Here's my final assignment for AM springboard, hope you guys like it!

Cheers!

Jose

AM Springboard: Week 9 Robot Arm

This week was a continuation from last week's Robot Arm animation. The focus for this exercise was to clean up the animation (move from block to spline) and learn how to use Parent Constraints. YIKES! Without going into much technical details, Parent Constraints are used when an object (the parent) drives another object's Translation and Rotation data. In my case the Robot's Arm (parent/driver) grabs the Can (child) from one side of the screen to the other. This method is useful for when you have a character in a scene interacting or holding different kinds of objects. There's a lot of information on this subject, and I'm still trying to wrap my head around the technical aspects of using constraints, but for now that's pretty much the basic explanation what constraints are and how they work.

Besides using constraints, I tried to experiment with different types of workflows. Moving from block to spline can be intimidating and things can get all crazy! So I decided to try different methods just to understand how each type of spline worked and how they affected my blocking. Trial and error is one of favorites methods of learning, so why not? I had a couple of late nights (with lots of coffee) trying to figure out and clean up my animation to a point I was happy. Totally worth it! There's so much you can learn from experimentation and making mistakes. Not to mention all the stuff I learned from the awesome feedback I got from other AM students, they are always there for you when you need an extra pair of eyes and to keep you motivated. :)

Have a great Memorial Weekend!

-Jose

AM Springboard: Week 8

I can't believe we are done with Week 8 already, 2 more weeks and AM Springboard is over! I'm having such a great time with the animation assignments and just absorbing about every little piece of information our mentor and lecture has given us. Things like the Graph Editor, tangent types and splines are finally clicking and making sense to me. The Graph Editor was such a confusing and foreign tool for me but now I'm beginning to understand how powerful this tool can be for your animations.

The first assignment for the week was to animate a bouncing ball and then import our same animation of the bouncing ball once or twice. After importing your animation, our job was to use the Graph Editor to readjust the timing and values by scaling the keys up or down. It was a great exercise to work on! By doing so you have a better understanding how simple changes in the Graph Editor can affect your timing and sense of weight.

If you notice in my bouncing ball assignment below, the weight and timing of the balls are all different. It's basically the same animation for all 3 balls, I only scaled up or down the keys for each ball (some minor tweaks on the Translation X and Y) but for the most part is the same. Very cool trick!

Our second assignment was to work on a simple animation of a robot arm grabbing a can with a max of a 100 frames. It was a fairly open assignment so you can either go very simple or you can go crazy and built some character into your animation. I though it looked more like a mantis so I decided to approach it differently and give the robot some character. This week was our blocking pass only (that's why is still looks a little rough) but for next week's assignment I get to refine the details and clean up my animation. Should be fun! Hope you guys like it!

Happy animating!
Jose