delicious 3D !

I recently watched 'UP' and 'Cloudy with a chance of meatballs' in 3D. Its such an different experience. Watching UP (Brilliant film btw) in 3D was like watching the characters as if they were actors on stage right in front. Its much more than just a fancy new thing. Cloudy was great too, experiencing a food rain is one of the best thing that could ever happen (expect for the storm like in the end ;) )

The dark 3D glasses defintely make the audience look like a bunch of dorks, but who cares, all eyes are glued to the screen :) Here is a drawing I did just for fun.

Demo Reel

My animation demo reel is ready.



Responsible for all the character animation. Character Rigs provided by animationmentor.com

Monsters under the bed

Glowing monsters! Did this one yesterday.

(click picture for bigger version)

AM Alumni !

Some days ago I finished my AM journey as a student, I will be saying this for the n-th time now - I cant believe how these months flew by. When we get to do the thing we love to do every day, its just so much fun !
Today a new term starts back at AM and I am missing the excitement of getting to know the new mentor, classmates and such. Anyway, I can move on :) Heres my Alumni badge I can flash now ;)

Now that I am an Alumni, my blog will undergo some makeover (well, not really, its just a fancy word). I'll re-design some small things here and will be posting drawings, animation and just more blah. Watch out for it !

Short Film "Phone Interview" complete

Hello folks!
Last week was the last of my AnimationMentor journey as a student. I finished the short film I had started 6 months back.

Working on this has been a great learning experience. I learnt a great deal about the whole process of film making right from developing a story and got to animate a lot as well :) I would be glad to have your comments.



Music by Alexandra Harwood.

Thanks for watching :)

Short film WIP

Here is the Work In Progress of my animation. Feel free to comment below.

Please note, There is some problem with the encoding/player which is making it drop few frames and delay at few times. I'll try and find a solution for this soon.


Blocking pass



Blocking-Plus pass


Now on I'll try and be more regular about updating the blog. Thanks for watching.

Class 6: short film production

Aloha! Its been a while I havn't updated the blog. Class 6 started this July and I was so pumped about it that I got too busy with it.
My new mentor is Keith Sintay . He is a super awesome guy and a great animator. If you have watched Open Season, Surf's Up, Tarzan, Mulan, Spirit and even the recent Transformers2, you have watched his work. He has been a 2d animator at Disney and later jumped into CG animation. Presently he works at DigitalDomain. If you want a peek at how awesome his work is, watch his demoreel. I am sure you will be as blown away as much as I was :)
This term I am having few familiar faces and some new ones as classmates and the Q&As have been fun. These guys are really good and keep pushing their work, its really inspiring to watch their films progress through the weeks.

Since this term started I've been totally busy working long hours on the animation for my short film. We are recommended to keep the short film upto 30 seconds in length so its doable in 3 months. My story was around 55 seconds in layout itself. So I knew I had to push it real hard in order to give it a good chance to finish it with polish by end of the term.

Now we are half way into this term and the animation is finally coming together. I am happy with the progress I've done in this term. With the animation, the film's screen time went a little over 1 minute now! I'll upload the blocking and blocking-plus passes of the animation soon.

Here are some designs I did to explore the look and feel of the characters and their surroundings at the end of last term. It helped me explore the colors and get them to support the story and animation. As you will notice, the design for the homeless guy changed since I had to use another rig whose head was a different shape than what was in the drawing. Hope you like them :)




- Chai