Its been one year now since us Animators at DDU went through an Animation boot camp - a never heard of before training session. It was three weeks jam-packed with information, energy, motivation and learning. Never before had I felt this amount of excitement-per-minute for such long duration.
For three weeks we totally dived to discover more about our passion and took time to analyze, learn, rethink a lot of things. Three weeks any Animator would die for !
We were lucky to have Jason Spencer Galsworthy who is a super Supervising Animator from PDI to head the training. Genuinely nice and fun guy !
It was all about going back to what inspired our passion for Animation, to find where we need to head to bring out the best in us and the tools and approach required to go in that direction.
For one entire week we had Rebecca Stockley, well known improv teacher, train us how to approach acting, improv and also helped us find our strengths and shortcomings - eventually helping us see what we need to focus more on.
The next week was equally amazing, we had an extraordinary animator and film-maker Chris Landreth teach us about facial animation. That means, studying the muscles of the face, understanding how emotions show through our faces because of this complex muscles under the face. The class also taught us how to more effectively study facial reference. It empowered us with the kind of information and application that I never imagined existed. By the way, Chris has also won an Oscar for his short-film.
The last week was the animator extraordinaire JSG taking the stage (not a physical stage) and helping us find our ways to the our next level of animation - in terms of performance, technicalities, planning, approaching a shot, polishing a performance, becoming a better professional and much much more!
We had a guest appearance by our then Head of Animation John Hill who went through his process of animating a shot and answered a lot of questions we had, especially his way of planning.
During the next show we worked on, I applied a lot of things I learnt during this month and I could see my animation improving a lot! I feel incredibly lucky to have been a part of this boot camp and it definitely makes me approach things a whole lot differently than before.
One interesting thing, during AnimationMentor (AM) we had a video lecture with Rebecca talking about improv for our short-film development term. That class had helped me a lot to explore ideas.
It was awesome to actually get to meet her and learn much more! Heres a pic of us DDU AM'ers with her and AM's adorable Spike !
