Horton Q&A !

Last week was a big opportunity for me to interact with Mike Walling, who is an animator who worked on Horton Hears a Who. On May 13th we had a special Horton &Q&A. That too, at 2:30 am after midnight ! How was I gonna miss it? No way! :D
I woke up early and joined the Q&A and maaan the server was so slow. That was very natural, because this session was open for everyone from class1 to class3. Everyone was jumping into the Q&A. It was a crazy time with all the video lag. Thankfully, the audio was working quite well.

All students were very enthusiastic and got all our questions answered. I got to asked about how did they think of the character Katie and whats that "aaaah" expression all about ?? :D
They said that Katie was one of the little characters in the forest. While story-boarding, the "aaah" expression was put in as a gag. They werent really sure how well it will work, but whoa! It became Soo popular, Katie has got her own videos on YouTube. About the expression, even they were confused about what it exactly meant. It was something wierd .. like a mix of happiness, excitement. Katie was animated by BlueSky animator Jason Martinsen whos also a mentor at AM.

The Q&A dint last long as usual mentor Q&As do as they had class4 to 6 to talk to. But that was one memorable experience I will never forget : )

Session 107

This week was CRAZY !! This was the mother of all assignments till now. It had everything we learnt since class1 started. We had to make sure everything - timing, spacing, anticipation, stretch and squash, overlap worked together right in this work. I got my hands on the cute tailor. As this assignment has so much going on, its really difficult to make sure everything works right. This was the most challenging assignment of all till date.
What a time to screw things up. I put in 1 day of planning and came up with a really lame and boring shot. I uploaded it for my peers to see and most were disappointed. One of my friends gave a really genuine suggestion and told how that assignment wasnt really working. I tried to be brave and just scrapped it and started from scratch afresh. I did a new plan and went ahead with it with a fresh approach. It did work well ! :)
This is what I had planned for..


This is the final work I turned in.


In between the week, I got my eCritique for last week's pendulum animation from Jalil. Wow, I was so happy to see that he liked it and I got an impressive grade! Getting overlap into work is one of the most difficult things in animation and I had just done it quite well!! WooHoo! :D

Some digital splash

Today I did a sketch/render in Photoshop on my wacom tablet. Its first time I put it to use for some sketching. Here it is.

"IronMan"

Heavy Metal

Ok, confused about the title?


By heavy metal, I mean IRONMAN ! I got a chance to watch it last week. IRONMAN is one of the best super-hero movies, though I would rate Spider-man 1 and 2 more just because its been my favorite comic book since childhood. I havent read much of IronMan comics, but was keen on watching it because of great reviews it got and the VFX.

This movie has everything to be a super super-hero movie.. great visual effects, animation and cool acting performance by Robert Downey Jr. The VFX are fantastic.. ILM keeps coming up with ground-breaking stuff, still I feel Transformers was an even better treat. I would recommend to anyone into kick-ass action flicks.
Stan-Lee the maker of the ironman comics also makes the mandatory appearance though really small, as he does in movies on his characters just the way he has to appear in every Spider-man movie !

The main thing that makes this movie different is the story.. the way its staged. All the events happen in today's world. It has all the things that make you identify with today's situation about war and terrorism and arms race. The way they have approached the topic of how we are destructing ourselves for our short term benefits is great. The movie has not only action, futuristic technology, audis, glitz but some heart to it. This story definitely dares to be different.I just love the way the movie ends.. making it so much different than other superhero movies ! Go watch it if you havent yet.

Session 106 .. Overlap and FK pain

What an exhaustive week !
This week we had to study overlap. I thought I knew what that principle is.. but I was So wrong !! There is lot more to it than meets the eye. Its really difficult to attain it and make it believable.

Now, I had this crazy Pendulum rig from AM which we had to animate. This time we got a picklist of two levels of difficulty for animation. I chose the more difficult one and tried to be creative. I thought of showing some figure 8 curves on the pendulum's motion.
Believing that it was easy to get it was really insane. I had under-estimated the challenge!
Heres the plan I had..

Isnt it cool ? Yeah, there was a surprise ahead for me..

Now after I was done getting really cool figure 8 curves on the general motion of the pendulum, I found something was making all the motion look haywire. After a lot of fooling around with the rig, I found that the rig was in FK and not IK ! I had to modify the rig or do it in FK. Doing it in FK was going to be a lot of pain .. but after talking to some peers and AM support I got to know that the Rig was purposely setup that way to get us used to animate with FKs.
Maaaan, counter-animating a FK setup can be such a pain ! I spent all of my week making the rig what I wanted to do and not what the computer wanted to do.

Heres the goody.. all done and ready to be pulled apart at my Mentor's e-Critique..



So I learnt many new things this week at AM..
1. OVERLAP !!
2. Counter-animating in FK
3. NEVER under-estimate any kind of assignment. You never know how it can be demanding.

Now I think I know what more to expect on this Crazy ride to being an animator.. Its definately is going to get even tougher..

I heard a "who" !

I got to watch Horton hear a Who , the weekday after it was released here in India. It was a movie I was waiting for because it was from BlueSky Animation Studios, the people who made Ice Age 1&2 ! Also another reason to add on top was that over 20 of graduates and past students of AnimationMentor have worked on the movie.



Horton is definitely a must watch movie. The animation is mind-blowing, the story is very humble, the composition and production design is beautiful and Amazing acting performances by animators !
Its a story of Horton, an elephant who one day finds a clover with a tiny li'l speck on it. He believes there are people on it as the speck makes sounds. Indeed, the speck has a world on its own full of creatures called "who"s who are a happy-go-lucky kind of people. With his perspective of "A persons a person, no matter how small", Horton sets out to save the world on the speck from the authoritative Kangaroo and other wild from the jungle of Nool.

Horton's acting is great ! The way he wraps, curls, stretches his ears to make funny hats and punk caps adds the fun to the main performance. No one will miss Katie the li'l yellow furry sheep-like creature in Horton's class. Whenever shes happy she does some crazy expression saying "Aaaaaaah" which cracks me up every time I watched her do it :D

I just love some of the scenes .. the one when Horton is searching for "the" clover in a sea of pink clovers, then the end scene is great too when the camera trucks out to show that even our world could be a tiny li'l speck in someone else's world reinforcing the thought that "A persons a person, no matter how small". So True !

Sessions 105 and 104

WoW ! I just cannot believe how time flies when you do the thing you love to do the most. Its already more than a month since starting the class and I already feel I have learned a lot from my time at AM than I did learn on my own in last 6 months.

I just completed my week 5 assignment yesterday. We had to animate a ball bouncing through an obstacle course. The main objective was to study anticipation and Squash-n-Stretch. At the same time the ball should do all the things it did in previous assignments.
The moment I saw the assignment, I went crazy because this was the first time we could show more creativity in the animation while following the setup that AM gave. Many times students move around the obstacle course to create different paths. I did not move any part of the obstacle just to put myself in a habit of working in specific layout settings.
We also had to submit a sketch poses of "devastation" and pose our beloved 'Stu' Rig in one of the sketched poses.
This week was the most packed one with me spending most of my day into animating the assignment. This was hell lot tough than compared to what I had thought.

I cannot stress enough the AM community is giving me. I get continuous detailed feedback on my work from campus mentors, peers and peer-buddies. This makes me go out and give out suggestions on my friends' works. This sharing of ideas is just great !

Here goes the result..



And here goes the pose "devastated"


Last week was a mix of things. I got a bad grade from my Mentor. He pointed out the major problem in last week's assignment. I had forced the ball to stop at point B. I should have let it bounce the way it would naturally do. But this made me push even farther and came up with a good assignment for that week. I also turned in the revision for bouncing ball assignment.
The assignment we had was animation of two bouncing balls.. yes two ! Each with a different weight. I did a ping-pong ball and an iron ball. I worked really hard on that and guess what ? My mentor liked it and also gave out a good grade ! Yay!
Here is last week's (session 104) assignment..



Here is the revision to Session 103 assignment..





See you soon with something more interesting ..
Adios !
CnL.