I started life drawing again last week and an animation/texturing internship at Dream Machine Studios. It was a great week, but I didn’t animate as much as usual and was feeling a bit rusty this morning. So I decided to do a little test with ballie without planning anything out beforehand.

Sometimes you just have to do a quick little something to get the animation muscles warmed up before you’re ready to dive back into the complicated stuff!

One of the best blogs out there right now for animators looking to improve how they think about film is Mark K’s Temple of the Seven Golden Camels. One of the things that makes it so good is that he doesn’t just talk about concepts, he illustrates them with photos and drawings that make sense to a visually wired brain. His most recent post breaking the 180 degree rule was a great example of why I read his blog.

First of all, you may notice that my reel is now bigger and has much better, non-ear-injuring sound.

It’s all thanks to my good friend Michaelle who is a Final Cut ninja. She’s helped me a lot, and provided me with my own copy of FCP which I must now learn to use.

Secondly, I’ve graduated from AM, but that doesn’t mean I’m out of the club. I’ve been peer buddying students in the program this term and continuing to participate in the forums, events, etc…including the weekly theme sketch. I feel like I’m really starting to get into the groove of these weekly sketches, so I’m going to share the ones I’ve done so far even though there are still several weeks left to go.

One of the gaps in my AM training is that I never managed to squeeze any 4 legged critter animation into my assignments. Once again HighEnd3D came to my rescue with this quite nice and free horse rig. This is my first attempt at a quadruped walk, second spline pass. After I was halfway into it, another animator told me that in his opinion a realistic horse was absolutely the hardest 4 legged thing to animate. Good thing I started there then, ha ha!

I graduated from Animation Mentor last weekend and it was great. I have no pictures or anything else to show for it yet though, because right after graduation I got trounced by a nasty flu (Christine Fournier apparently got it too- does that make Richard the disease vector, or was it those British blokes?) and I have yet to fully right myself. Instead, here’s the updated version of my reel to peruse, which includes a few shots from my still in progress short film.

Warning! I’ve still got a lot of work to do on the sound, so you may want to take your headphones off before playing this. The whistle sound effects are still quite shrill.

I can’t wait to get a job and get out there, but in the meantime I’ll keep plugging away at my short film and the other shots I have in progress.

Graduation is still several weeks away, but my last class is finished and I think it’s beginning to sink in.

I have lots more to learn. So, inspired by my fellow AMer Jamie whose been blogging her experiments, I’m going to be doing lots of little quick tests like this so I can practice timing & spacing, use non-AM rigs, and learn things we skipped at AM like these mysterious cycle thingies…