NewsTime

Hello and welcome back !

Its been quite some time since I've updated things here. There are a lot of interesting things that happened with me in last two months. So here are the top News Stories at this hour.

got my first gig !

Exciting times! I finished studies at AnimationMentor in September and then within a month's time got hired at Prana Studios in Mumbai as a Character Animator. It is super exciting to get a chance to work at one of the best studios in the country as my first gig. I am here to work on a really good project and am excited to work on it everyday. This place has a lot of good talent and I am always learning new things from them.
Prana has previously worked on Disney's Tinkerbell and Tinkerbell - Land of Lost Treasure. If you haven't watched them yet, definitely check them out. Both the films are really beautiful !

Moving to Mumbai from Pune was a big thing for me. Pune has a much cooler and dry climate and is less than half as crowded as Mumbai is. Now that I've been there for two months, am getting used to it now.


my short-film got nominated !!

Another News. My animated short film "Phone Interview" got nominated for 24Fps Awards. In the end it dint win, still it was a great feeling to see it being nominated. I know there are a lot of ways I could have made the story more interesting, but then I am happy for it being my first personal film.


conducted a Disney drawing workshop !!!

This month I got a chance to conduct a cartoon drawing workshop for Disney at Landmark bookstore in my home town Pune. The event was a part of Disney's ToyFest to celebrate the holidays. It was a great experience being among kids and teaching them to draw Mickey Mouse. There were about 15-20 kids around 6 to 12 years of age and they did a splendid job ! It was an hour of pure joy. Some kids needed more attention than others and often kept calling me to check out how it was coming. It was a lot of fun teaching them how to draw using simple shapes and to see them do great at it. At the end of the hour long session there were prizes to be given to the three best entries and some gifts for all the participating kids. I remembered my days as a kid who loved to draw. I wish I get another chance to conduct such a workshop again.

Thats all news for now, Next time you are here there should be something more interesting (hopefully ;)). See you soon, same browser, same Blog !

- C.

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.

{ Note: This reel is not updated, contains work from before October 2009 only. }




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

Short Film Layout

Class 5 is over at AM and it just flew by ! It was just 15 months back that I was dreaming of making my own short film and cant believe how time went by doing the things that I love to do.

This was another great term, was especially different since this one dealt with pre-production of an animated film. We had been introduced to strong planning also I knew in theory how a film is brought from script to screen but dint know HOW its done practically. Class 5 gave us a hands-on experience on how to develop a story, pitching it, boarding it, reboarding it, cutting together and editing animatics and then the layouts.

Thanks to Elliot Bour, my mentor for the term, I learnt so much about storyboarding. The QnAs were very interesting and he also did some demo's for us which were pretty cool. I'll start exploring storyboarding more, I like the process of telling the story visually and drawing everything.

Here is the final layout pass of the short film as of now. Cant wait to start animating it :)

Thanks to my friend Littu Kurien for help with the garbage-bag Rig. You rock :)

- C.

Toy Story 3 coming

I have been waiting for this since I heard its in the making. Heres the Toy Story 3 teaser. By now I guess you have seen in a lot of times, but I couldnt help contain my excitement.

http://www.apple.com/trailers/disney/toystory3/

ToyStory was THE film that made me fall in love with animation and have been a HUGE fan of it. I remember coming home completely blown away and trying to make a comic book of everything I had seen in it. Unfortunately I couldnt remember exactly what happened after the scene where plastic soldiers find new toys being brought for Andy's birthday and so had to drop my idea of a comic book. I drew a lot of toy story characters especially Woody and Buzz, also made a small Woody doll out of paper and cloth. This is one of the few movies that left a deep impression on me as a 9 year old.

ToyStory 2 was even more awesome and I have been waiting for another sequel since then.

The wait will be over next year, coincidentally exactly one year from now :)

I am sure every ToyStory fan will enjoy the teaser, it has the beautiful Randy Newman theme, almost all the characters from the first two movies and the same feel !

To Infinity and Beyond !

- Chai'

CGTExpo 09

Last weekend I attended CGTantra Expo 2009 in Mumbai. CGTantra.com is an online community of artists related to computer graphics arts (on the lines of CGtalk) and they run this expo every year to showcase the best works from the community, conduct masterclasses, job fair and basically a chance to meet more artists from around the country. I had to finish my assignment early to make it to the expo. It was a day very well spent.

I attended a 'meet the artists' session about character animation which was hosted by Anand Baid and Deepak Ganguly. Anand is a lead animator at Dreamworks dedicated unit, Bangalore and Deepak is a lead animator at Tata Elxsi. The session was really cool, and it also focused a lot on staging and composition, which I just love to think about ! After the session I got a chance to show my AM progress reel to both of them and got some Awesomely detailed critiques. I got a good idea about what needs to be on my reel later on and also about what was missing and what needed polishing in my work.
Thanks a lot to Anand and Deepak, that some time they spent with the feedback was like striking gold to me !!

Later on me and my friend Aniket took a look at the job fair. Since I still have some months to go before I finish AM, I dint have a final demo-reel which I could apply with. There were some studios which wanted to recruit right away while some others who will need artists some time soon. I hope the industry keep getting bigger and better, increasing the quality of work done. I'll wait for the day I am ready to send in my reel :)

There was a sneak peek into Merry Madagascar, a 20 min film being made at Dreamworks Bangalore. The quality of animation and the look of the film was totally awesome ! At the same level of what we have seen in Madagascar 1 and 2. I am sure the studio is going to reach great heights with such amazing artists working there. The session was conducted by artists from the studio. They talked about their animation process, the character Fx, lighting and effects. I had never known what goes into the lighting and effects - what kind of passes and experiments do they have to do. This session was insightful and I got to know a little about these other technical departments too. You could read a news item about this session here - http://www.animationxpress.com/index.php?file=story&id=19671

Visiting such expo is also about meeting artists who do some really cool work! While me and my friend were hanging out and snacking, we bumped into some guys there. We met some guys who have started their own online Comics website. I checked it out yesterday and flipped (or clicked) through some pages of their first online comic book "Rage" and it was awesome ! The illustration style, design and story narration is very interesting. I recommend you take a look at their site and I am sure you'll enjoy reading their comics. Another interesting thing is that they are free to read online and its great to see artists making use of the new "internet revenue model" as we could call it.
Heres a link - http://rockstarcomics.net/ alternative link- http://www.rockstar-comics.co.in/


There were a lot of other great sessions at this event. I wish I could attend more seminars there, but some of them happened to be overlapping. Overall I just enjoyed it and I will look forward to next such event.

Enough of blogging, I got to get back to layouts !! ;)

-Chai'

Short Film Animatic

Heres the short film animatic ready to go into layouts. I have started with the layouts in Maya last week and it should be complete by the end of the term.

I had a lot of fun drawing out ideas, camera angles and timing everything so the story is easy to understand and as close as possible to the final film. Exploring compsition and staging is so huge ! It can totally define how the audience will "feel" the film. As I said earlier I am totally liking storyboarding.



Hope you like it :)

UP Storyboards

I have been working on the storyboards and animatic of my short-film "Phone Interview". Lately my interest in Storyboarding is increasing. I am loving this process of visually telling the story. Its like having all the freedom to try out different things without getting too busy with the details. I am working on the storyboarding for last 2 weeks and its been awesome ! There is a lot of things I have learnt, the story has developed a long way just through putting together drawings of how I visualize it. Its amazing how just a slight change in the composition, posing can make a huge change in how the audience will experience the emotion in it.

These days I am trying to find most I can about this amazing art. Look what I stumbled upon today - storyboards from Pixar's UP !

http://characterdesign.blogspot.com/2009/05/pixars-up-storyboards.html
Now thats very inspiring :)

I'll put up my animatic really soon.

Making Stories

For some time now I have been thinking about ideas for my short film. I had some ideas I had scribbled and made tiny little drawings of whatever I "saw" in my mind. Last 1-2 weeks I have been thinking about what can make a good story for a very short film, since we have to keep it 30-40 seconds in length to make sure it can be completed in the next 6 months. Even when I would go for a run or a jog I had things popping up in my mind. As soon as I got a chance, I made note of these things on paper, even a word or a sentence that had hit me.

This thing has helped me well. Then last week I watched the first lecture of class5 which was amazing. It helped me free my mind and explore more ideas. I am happy I could come up with six rough ideas for a story. Not all of them are great, but exploring is one huge part of the process.

I put them together in words and posted them on a Facebook note and AM Public Review and there were a lot of replies from friends, about why they liked something and why something needed more attention to make it work. Some of them were very insightful from a point of view of story-structure and flow. All these comments, however small or in-depth they were, are going to help me work on my story pitches which we are going to submit to our mentors this weekend. So, you are one of those peeps who commented, Thanks a lot for your time and suggestions !

I have to come up with 3 story pitches to submit as assigment this weekend. I'll keep thinking more for new ideas and also how to refine the existing ones. Do check back again to read the three ones that make it into the submission.

Short Film Pre-production starts

I am now in Class5 at AM and am kick-starting the process of planning my short film. This class is about pre-production, that is all about coming up with interesting story, characters, pitching stories, nailing it right, deciding the story structure, making story-boards and finally layout. The next class we are going to take the film from layout to polished animation. So this is going to be 6 months in the works and the most important project I'll be working on at AM.
I cant contain the excitement of doing all this. I have started to develop interest in story-boarding as well. Whatever ups and downs come in the next months, its going to be an awesome ride !

This week was week-1 of class5 and we got introduced to our new mentors. My mentor this term is Elliot Bour. I had seen some of his student's work before and I knew I was in good hands. Before the Q&A I checked out his website and I was blown away. He started at Disney in 1991 and has worked on 2d animation in films like Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, Mulan and more. He has also experience working in story-boarding and directing animation films. The 2d animation in his animation reel is fantastic ! I recommend you visit www.elliotbour.com and check out the "animation" and "shorts" sections. Its really entertaining and a joy to watch.

The first Q&A was nice, we got to know the mentor and each other. This time my class is a mix of some familiar faces and some new ones. Elliot is a nice guy, he explanied to use what is in store for us in this term and also gave us a peek into his approach on mentoring. Then some of us asked some very good questions and then wrapped up.

This week have no submission, just brainstorming to do for story ideas.

One Year at AnimationMentor

Hello everyone out there!
Its exactly one year I have been studying at AM and its unbelievable to see how far I have come. It feels good to see I have made a lot of progress since the rough pencil tests I did before joining. At the same time, its shocking to see how time flies by, it still feels like its been just a couple of months back, that I was getting ready and curious to get in and start to absorb all I can.
I want to thank AM, their mentors, staff and my AMer buddies who make it THE most awesome educational experience. I have two more classes to go and really looking forward to what magic is in store for me.

Now on, I'll update my blog frequently, so if you are interested, do visit and I am sure you wont be turned down by a really dusty old post ;)

- Chai'

Class 4 finito

This week was the last for Class4 and here is the animation of the 2 character scene assignment. Class4 was a huge step towards understanding acting and getting more deep into animation. I thank my awesome mentor Greg Kyle and my super-helpful classmates and other AMers who gave a lot of great feedback on this.



Feel free to comment :)

Finished Acting shot

Its been more than three weeks since the new term started and I am having a great time playing around with facial animation for the first time ever. We had to complete the shot we started with one person dialog in the last term. So after these three weeks, and the weeks in the term before, its finally complete.



Along with the animation, We had to do some facial poses. This is an exercise to get the essence of the emotion in the face on Bishop - the rig. Here are some of them.


Now its time to start afresh with another dialog animation, interesting times ahead !

Class 5: Advanced Acting begins

The advanced acting class started three weeks back and I am enjoying every bit of it. This term we will get to know how to finish a dialog acting test complete with all the facial acting and the final polish. I was very excited about this term since this is where we get to complete a shot without any limitations.
My new Mentor is Greg Kyle. He is a character animator at Laika Studios and is a very open guy. We had three Q&As till date and I am always looking forward to them. He has worked at ILM previously and worked on a lot of films.
So far this class has been very interesting, every week learning something totally new !
Looking forward to starting my next animation..

Trailer for "9" comes up

This is a must watch trailer.

"9" is an upcoming animated sci-fi movie. Its a story about a group of ragdoll characters which with their leader "9" have to defend the legacy of life on earth from droids and robots who have taken over our planet in a world past human existence. The trailers show some person/being who has supposedly created the warriors narrating it.
Its will release on 09/09/09. This is one of the most kick-ass trailers I have seen in some time.

Follow the link - http://www.apple.com/trailers/focus_features/9/

"NY Freaks" go to Africa

A week ago I watched Madagascar 2 and it really lived upto my expectation. The story in the first movie is taken further on an interesting journey. The film is a treat even before the movie starts, the penguins attacking the boy in the dreamworks logo is damn funny and got me ready for what was coming.
The animation is just awesome. The backgrounds and sets are pleasing. Character designs of the new characters (other than those from Madagascar1) introduced in the film dont seem to have much novelty though.
Alex, Marty, Gloria and Melman going to their own place - Africa. The new world they discover, the surprises in store for each keep the movie fresh. The other characters - the Penguins, King Julian and the monkeys guarantee laughs for their escapist plans, ritualism and worker-union problems respectively.
I felt the old lady from the first movie was over-used. It was good the first time she is seen in the safari, but keeping her doing all that repeatedly was tiring. The Lion story reminded me of The Lion King and was predictable. Apart from these things, the movie rocks :) I will recommend it to anyone wants to laugh out loud. The kid on a seat next to me just couldnt stop laughing !

Sketch: "Mystically Mundane"

A quick sketch on paper I did around a month back.

Happy New Year :)

Wish you all a Happy 2009