I'm taking down all my tabs with animation on it for now, mainly because I haven't yet figured out how public I want this blog to be. When my reel's ready, I'll put it up on my personal website, obviously, but this term ended with a lot of unfinished work and I'm taking a step back right this instant to focus on fundamentals. The plan for the next few weeks while I'm home with my family in Salt Lake City is a) get my new Macbook Pro set up, and b) re-learn how to draw.
The Mac turned into a time sink because I didn't know about the Maya 2011/Mac Quicktime playblast bug - audio sync is off unless you playblast from Frame 1. This is unacceptable as far as I'm concerned, but rather than go back to Maya 2010, I'm going to write a command line app to work around the bug and generate a properly sync'd Quicktime movie. So far I've been taking the scenic route in trying to figure out the Mac architecture and development environment, but I should pick up speed soon.
The drawing is going to be an ongoing process. I want to get my fundamentals solid enough to do 2D pencil tests, which means breaking some very old habits. I'll probably be using the blog to get feedback, but right now I'm still just reading books and trying to come up with a game plan.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Monday, November 29, 2010
Internet Lockdown
This might be my last blog post till the end of AM. Basically, I discovered that pulling my Ethernet cable did wonders for my productivity. I'll still be checking email and such, but probably once per day rather than every 5 seconds.
The goal is to get through the rest of this shot in the next two weeks. This week's assignment submission wasn't perfect, but I feel like I learned what I needed to know. I had my spine epiphany earlier, and I also recognize a couple of the biggest traps I fall into:
1) Getting distracted (by Facebook, email, youtube)
2) Polishing graph editor curves instead of the animation, resulting in mushy timing
3) Focusing too much on screen space rather than 3D space
So what I need to do right now is TRUST that everything my friends have taught me has finally sunk into my head, trust that I really do know how to animate, trust that the spine epiphany was real, and just GET THE HELL THROUGH THE REST OF THE SHOT.
Obviously, I'll come up for air for feedback, but probably by emailing people directly or through the AM site. So this blog's part of the Internet lockdown for now. See you in two weeks!
The goal is to get through the rest of this shot in the next two weeks. This week's assignment submission wasn't perfect, but I feel like I learned what I needed to know. I had my spine epiphany earlier, and I also recognize a couple of the biggest traps I fall into:
1) Getting distracted (by Facebook, email, youtube)
2) Polishing graph editor curves instead of the animation, resulting in mushy timing
3) Focusing too much on screen space rather than 3D space
So what I need to do right now is TRUST that everything my friends have taught me has finally sunk into my head, trust that I really do know how to animate, trust that the spine epiphany was real, and just GET THE HELL THROUGH THE REST OF THE SHOT.
Obviously, I'll come up for air for feedback, but probably by emailing people directly or through the AM site. So this blog's part of the Internet lockdown for now. See you in two weeks!
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Fallout
This has been a strange week. I needed some time to regroup before posting. Basically, I had a lot of fun socializing, submitted my worst assignment ever, and am now wondering if I need to rethink the self-punishment thing.
The voices in my head I'm hearing right now are the supportive ones, not the ones that kick you when you're down. Even the Peer Buddy who honestly said, "I kinda liked it better the old way" - that's useful feedback that's sometimes difficult to give and absolutely belongs in the supportive category. So I'm not upset as I would have been previously, but will that lead to better or worse animating this week?
A couple side factors: I was and am borderline sick on and off throughout the week, but that may be because my careful nutrition and allergy management routine was thrown off by socializing and the usual December germs. There's no way I would have missed the CTN Expo happy hour on Friday or my out-of-town friend's pre-Thanksgiving gathering on Saturday, but I'd been feeling lousy on Tuesday and under different circumstances would probably have blown off the weekend plans. This week continues to be slow-moving - I swear I've been asleep more than I've been awake the last two days, and I'm still feeling fatigued. Maybe this is punishment for being careless about the allergy mangement, I'm not sure. I did stick to my usual exercise schedule, but it hasn't given me my usual energy boost and I could definitely feel that something was off today when I went into the gym. The workout did help some, though, so hopefully I'm on the right track in terms of recovering my routine.
Plans for this week are real simple - go stepped wherever I feel myself starting to noodle, don't spend more than a day on that troublesome first section, and make my way through the entire rest of my shot. I know I phoned it in last week, and I know I can do better, but it's almost strange to dig deep by thinking of the supportive circle. In some was, fear/anger/resentment was the much better motivator, at least until it almost broke me.
The voices in my head I'm hearing right now are the supportive ones, not the ones that kick you when you're down. Even the Peer Buddy who honestly said, "I kinda liked it better the old way" - that's useful feedback that's sometimes difficult to give and absolutely belongs in the supportive category. So I'm not upset as I would have been previously, but will that lead to better or worse animating this week?
A couple side factors: I was and am borderline sick on and off throughout the week, but that may be because my careful nutrition and allergy management routine was thrown off by socializing and the usual December germs. There's no way I would have missed the CTN Expo happy hour on Friday or my out-of-town friend's pre-Thanksgiving gathering on Saturday, but I'd been feeling lousy on Tuesday and under different circumstances would probably have blown off the weekend plans. This week continues to be slow-moving - I swear I've been asleep more than I've been awake the last two days, and I'm still feeling fatigued. Maybe this is punishment for being careless about the allergy mangement, I'm not sure. I did stick to my usual exercise schedule, but it hasn't given me my usual energy boost and I could definitely feel that something was off today when I went into the gym. The workout did help some, though, so hopefully I'm on the right track in terms of recovering my routine.
Plans for this week are real simple - go stepped wherever I feel myself starting to noodle, don't spend more than a day on that troublesome first section, and make my way through the entire rest of my shot. I know I phoned it in last week, and I know I can do better, but it's almost strange to dig deep by thinking of the supportive circle. In some was, fear/anger/resentment was the much better motivator, at least until it almost broke me.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Two Birthday Gifts
Two cool birthday gifts this year:
One is that my mom's buying me a souped-up Macbook Pro and I'm spending the last of my AM student discount on the software for it. Woohoo!
The second... It's a gift to self, really, and perhaps harder to live up to - but I'm going to stop punishing myself on Sundays and start celebrating progress, however small or incomplete. This really does go all the way back to Jerkass in Class 3, who kept insisting that I was getting complacent whenever I dared to be happy about something. I'll never really know whether he was being actively malicious or just mistaken, but it did cast a long shadow over the rest of my time at AM. Basically, I internalized the attitude that if I didn't completely hate myself on Sundays, I must not be working hard enough.
He was completely hypocritical about this, of course. One of his more charming habits was to leave meaningless flattery on the workspaces of people he sniped about in private, in order to get meaningless flattery in return. And he sulked royally whenever a mentor or the teeming masses didn't appreciate his brilliance, which, strangely enough, happened more and more frequently in the later classes as the mentors go tougher. Again, it's spectacularly obvious in hindsight that I should have rid myself of this person long before I actually did, but no one's a complete jerk right off the bat. In real life, you can judge a person in the context of their community. In a virtual community like AM, it sometimes takes a little longer, but the truth does come out in the end.
Anyway, that's my birthday gift to self this year: to celebrate any and all progress, no matter how small, and quit with the self-punishment and self-doubt. This has to continue after AM, of course. I won't be done with my reel at the end of Class 6. But neither will I collapse at the finish line - I plan to keep right on going.
One is that my mom's buying me a souped-up Macbook Pro and I'm spending the last of my AM student discount on the software for it. Woohoo!
The second... It's a gift to self, really, and perhaps harder to live up to - but I'm going to stop punishing myself on Sundays and start celebrating progress, however small or incomplete. This really does go all the way back to Jerkass in Class 3, who kept insisting that I was getting complacent whenever I dared to be happy about something. I'll never really know whether he was being actively malicious or just mistaken, but it did cast a long shadow over the rest of my time at AM. Basically, I internalized the attitude that if I didn't completely hate myself on Sundays, I must not be working hard enough.
He was completely hypocritical about this, of course. One of his more charming habits was to leave meaningless flattery on the workspaces of people he sniped about in private, in order to get meaningless flattery in return. And he sulked royally whenever a mentor or the teeming masses didn't appreciate his brilliance, which, strangely enough, happened more and more frequently in the later classes as the mentors go tougher. Again, it's spectacularly obvious in hindsight that I should have rid myself of this person long before I actually did, but no one's a complete jerk right off the bat. In real life, you can judge a person in the context of their community. In a virtual community like AM, it sometimes takes a little longer, but the truth does come out in the end.
Anyway, that's my birthday gift to self this year: to celebrate any and all progress, no matter how small, and quit with the self-punishment and self-doubt. This has to continue after AM, of course. I won't be done with my reel at the end of Class 6. But neither will I collapse at the finish line - I plan to keep right on going.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Notes from Catherine
Notes from Catherine below. I'm just adding some whitespace here so the jpg doesn't get lost behind the sidebar.
I'm commenting on your week 7 assignment. I think I mention something about shoulder head turning at the same time. but something else jumped into my eyes....the eyes :)
If you turn you head you almost (no rules of course) blink every time you do a turn otherwise you would feel queasy. added a picture to explain how I would do the drag and blink.
When the coach turns back F74, what about fix the kid a bit longer with the eyes. my impression is that the head and shoulder is moving together more that it should to make it dynamic.
also maybe you have to many ideas there. 1. looking to the kid 2. looking thoughtful in the air. 3. looking at the board.
Think it would be simpler 1. and then " blink" direct to 3.
I'm commenting on your week 7 assignment. I think I mention something about shoulder head turning at the same time. but something else jumped into my eyes....the eyes :)
If you turn you head you almost (no rules of course) blink every time you do a turn otherwise you would feel queasy. added a picture to explain how I would do the drag and blink.
When the coach turns back F74, what about fix the kid a bit longer with the eyes. my impression is that the head and shoulder is moving together more that it should to make it dynamic.
also maybe you have to many ideas there. 1. looking to the kid 2. looking thoughtful in the air. 3. looking at the board.
Think it would be simpler 1. and then " blink" direct to 3.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
A Burial
Not that I'm afraid of naming names, but as I've gotten older I've learned some measure of descretion, so let's introduce a new character we'll call Jerkass for short.
Some of you know Jerkass, as he was a classmate at AM. Some of you thought he was a twit from the beginning (hello, Fiona). Why did I ever befriend Jerkass? In hindsight, because I was cynical and didn't trust or know to trust AM and the AM community. So when Jerkass sniped behind peoples' backs about how our classmates were lazy or weren't going to make it, and constructed a color-coded spreadsheet of who the desirable mentors were based on the prestige of their studio, I kind of agreed.
This is not the side of me that most of you know. Anyone reading this blog has probably seen me give good crits, empathy, and encouragement. I may not always have known much about animation, but what I had, I had to share.
That said, I definitely entered AM under a cloud. Being away from production for eight months has mellowed me considerably and allowed me to remember the good times, of which there were many, but the stress and frustration of being a TD were very real to me at the time. The image I had in my head of the work I was doing was cormorant fishing - you know, the birds with a string tied around their neck so they can't swallow and instead have to bring the fish they catch back to the fisherman. I was there strictly as support staff for artists, and it drove me crazy to be doing the scutwork with no chance at the reward.
Yes, I did eventually get to do some crowds shot work. No, I was never treated unfairly by either of the studios I worked for. This is absolutely not about those companies or my coworkers. It's simply about my personal state of mind at the time I started AM, and why I was angry, tired, and cynical enough to find Jerkass's attitude appealing.
The rest is rather sad history - we were good friends through Classes 1 and 2, and then he turned on me in Class 3. I still have miles-long emails from him about how awful an animator I am, how I'm not going to make it, and how he feels sorry for me, interspersed with megolomanic ranting about how great he is. I'm not making this up, and I have the paper trail to prove it, but it's absolutely not worth revisiting. The really sad part is that in all that verbiage, there was next to no useful information - he'd say something like "I don't see the principles of animation in your work" with no further explanation.
For obvious reasons, I stopped talking to him by Class 4, but by then the damage was done - I'd become very, very gun-shy of legitimate crits. I always was, unfortunately, but this made it a lot worse because each crit was suddenly no longer just a crit, it was an assessment of whether or not I was going to make it.
I did my best to pull myself out from underneath that cloud. Being a peer buddy myself, leaning on peer buddies, reconnecting with old friends, and making new ones were all as important to me as the animation itself, these past three terms. But it was always a struggle not to sink into despair, and I don't think I ever really felt like myself again until now, almost at the end of Class 6.
I have a lot of work left to do after graduation. I know that. But I won the important moral victory with the help of you guys: I still love to animate and I finally believe in myself again.
Some of you know Jerkass, as he was a classmate at AM. Some of you thought he was a twit from the beginning (hello, Fiona). Why did I ever befriend Jerkass? In hindsight, because I was cynical and didn't trust or know to trust AM and the AM community. So when Jerkass sniped behind peoples' backs about how our classmates were lazy or weren't going to make it, and constructed a color-coded spreadsheet of who the desirable mentors were based on the prestige of their studio, I kind of agreed.
This is not the side of me that most of you know. Anyone reading this blog has probably seen me give good crits, empathy, and encouragement. I may not always have known much about animation, but what I had, I had to share.
That said, I definitely entered AM under a cloud. Being away from production for eight months has mellowed me considerably and allowed me to remember the good times, of which there were many, but the stress and frustration of being a TD were very real to me at the time. The image I had in my head of the work I was doing was cormorant fishing - you know, the birds with a string tied around their neck so they can't swallow and instead have to bring the fish they catch back to the fisherman. I was there strictly as support staff for artists, and it drove me crazy to be doing the scutwork with no chance at the reward.
Yes, I did eventually get to do some crowds shot work. No, I was never treated unfairly by either of the studios I worked for. This is absolutely not about those companies or my coworkers. It's simply about my personal state of mind at the time I started AM, and why I was angry, tired, and cynical enough to find Jerkass's attitude appealing.
The rest is rather sad history - we were good friends through Classes 1 and 2, and then he turned on me in Class 3. I still have miles-long emails from him about how awful an animator I am, how I'm not going to make it, and how he feels sorry for me, interspersed with megolomanic ranting about how great he is. I'm not making this up, and I have the paper trail to prove it, but it's absolutely not worth revisiting. The really sad part is that in all that verbiage, there was next to no useful information - he'd say something like "I don't see the principles of animation in your work" with no further explanation.
For obvious reasons, I stopped talking to him by Class 4, but by then the damage was done - I'd become very, very gun-shy of legitimate crits. I always was, unfortunately, but this made it a lot worse because each crit was suddenly no longer just a crit, it was an assessment of whether or not I was going to make it.
I did my best to pull myself out from underneath that cloud. Being a peer buddy myself, leaning on peer buddies, reconnecting with old friends, and making new ones were all as important to me as the animation itself, these past three terms. But it was always a struggle not to sink into despair, and I don't think I ever really felt like myself again until now, almost at the end of Class 6.
I have a lot of work left to do after graduation. I know that. But I won the important moral victory with the help of you guys: I still love to animate and I finally believe in myself again.
Chasing The Dream
Spine's still not all the way there yet, but screw it, today I'm just going to celebrate what I did right rather than fixate on everything that's still left to fix. Feedback welcome of course. :)
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