No more bathroom!

I started splining my shot this week. I just wanted to work out the rythym of the body and legs and make sure everything is working pretty good before I get into refining details.
I have to say, I'm loving doing this assignment. It's really fun and it's so exciting getting into new territory with the eyes and face, even with the limited rig. It sounds really corny, but I get more excited about animation every week. I can't wait to learn more!

Acting shot!

This was a busy week for me. My first pass of blocking for my acting shot! I was really nervous going into this project. I mean, we're into acting! It's so exciting and scary new all at once.
THe blocking came out better than I thought it would .I was nervous picking this line because it's more subtle than the pantomime and body mechanics shots we have done before. I was wondering what I would be animating. THere's no broad actions, and our face rig is limited to eye movements right now.WHile working on it , though, I realized there was ALOT of stuff going on. It didn't hit me in the face, but it's there. This took a long time to do, but I'm happy with the start I have on it. I took friday off off work to have more time to put into it. I was away aalll day Saturday taking my sister too NY city for her bacherlorette party. It raind the wwhole day, but it was fun. We saw a new show on broadway called the Pirate Queen. It was awesome and I totally recommend seeing it. The lead actresses were great!
Anyway, I'm really glad I took friday off to work on it because there's no way I would've finished with my saturday gone. I am going to change the setting to something less... bathroomish =) I believe the toilet's too distracting.
Animation Mentor has a tutoring program taught by fellow AM grads, and I went to this weeks and last week's session with Mike Stern. If you don't know who Mike is, check out his work at http://www.sternio.com/. His stuff is top notch. He kept a blog throughout AM and was a big inspiration to me to join. It's really cool that he's a tutor for us now, and it's really helpful to hear his comments on your work. He's a really cool guy to give his time to us like that.
Gotta go to bed!
Comments are always welcome and encouraged!

I need to watch more tv

I need to watch more tv, or something. This week we had to find audio clips for us to animate a dialog piece to. Sounds easy, right? Sit around, watching movies to try and find some dialog.... It's harder than one might think. For this project we have the remaining six weeks of this class to work on it, as well as the beginning of next class. That's a long time. I not only want to find a good quote to challenge me, but one that I'll be enthusiastic about working on for a couple of months.
So, I spent the last couple of weeks making myself watch an enormous amount of movies. My dvd collection has grown considerably from me raiding the local blockbuster sale rack. I wanted to find a quote that people wouldn't recognize right away, and to try and stay away from the overused ones that are so convenient to get on the internet. After ALL that movie watching, I found two of my quote options from a most unlikely source... Miss Congeniality 2. Yeah. Well, I'll be damned if anyone recognizes the quotes!
Up above id me acting out my potential quotes. I'm really undecided at the moment, and I really want to get the feedback from my mentor.
Anyway, enjoy watching me make a fool of myself! Me..? I'm going to read a book. I've watched enough videos this week already.
Comments are always welcome!

Cookie thief final!!

Here's the final version of the 2 beats pantomime animation. Well, final until I get my critique =)
Michal gave an awesome critique this week .It was a half hour long and really nit picked about polishing my shot. It;s great to hear him go through my assignment in such detail. If he didn't take the time to do that, I feel that I would never know to look for some of the stuff he pointed out. Now I know to look out for those details in future work I do,
For this week's assignment we have to find three audio quotes that we like for possible lines to animate. yay!!! Our models will have real faces now! They will be limited facial rigs at first, but I'm really excited to try this out. I started watching a bunch of movies last week to try and find some lines I want to animate. It's tough! I have a few in mind, but I'm going to watch a whole lot of movies this week too.
As always, comments and questions are welcome!