Personal progression during economic depression

The assignment was finished, and countless more changes, subtle at this point, made. Yay for me; I'm quite happy with how it turned out, and only a couple minor notes from my mentor on the knees, but all in all, the TLC that went into it really paid off. Here's the final version, with the box overlap added as well:

I aso began to develop a good and new pipeline that made my production a lot more efficient, particularly when coming to splining. That's part of the interesting phase of school, it's a lot of experimenting with different methods to find ones we're comfortable with and able to excel at, some work better for others.
In other exceptionally cool news, the revered Richard Williams, Animation director of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and author of my personal bible "The Animator's Survival Kit" came to town on Monday and gave a small lecture and QnA session. It was amazingly unbelievable, and his humility was something to behold. It was a fantastic pleasure to meet him, have him sign my book and take a quick photo. This man was able to learn from the "Nine Old Men" (the animators from Disney who constructed the rules behind successful animation) and help pass them along to the next generation of people, because noone had done that at that point.
Video reference, thumbnailing and blocking is also underway with the next week's assignment, this one involving a pole jump (ie. jumping from pole to pole with a character with no arms). Below is a sample of my blocking underway, no timing or spacing has been done yet, simply just working on posing; I chose a xmas theme, I don't really know why, hehe.

Well it's been long overdue for me to update this, and the real challenge has been with this last assignment. Essentially 3 weeks to do one 200 frame assignment, I didn't fully understand why but now I do. The learning curve is huge! It's amazing and nearly infathomable how many times I've reworked this shot and made changes; the detriments of learning body mechanics but it's really paying off. So I totally changed the idea, and reshot my video reference at the end of the week, as with this

Keep in mind the point of the assignment is to make the character do a 180 degree turn around. This idea however was well received by my mentor so I trudged forward with this

Which was a little less well recieved by my mentor, and many changes were made. Numerous iterations later, there was this

the shot nears completion and next week I will post the ultimate finished version. In the meantime, there is this shot, which I have excluded the box, but will have overlapping movement and fall off his head when he runs away. As well preconceptions for the next assignment, video reference and thumbnails shall be ready and well thought out.

Twice the terms, twice the challenge...

I've had a week off and Term 2 has begun, the bar is set high and I'm sallying forth full steam ahead. There isn't much to show yet, this is the follies of trying to post a blog mid-week, mid-assignment. I may change this up to provide something with a little more sustenance, I don't usually get to post everything I do all week. Anyways the first assignment of this term involves a turn-around but also the proper thinking and planning of a shot, starting from reference and thumbnailing to final production. Some fantastic tips and tricks, strategems and time-savers have been learned already and the excitement ensues! Here's some walk reference I've come up with already, tho there may be many changes yet ahead and even before the end of the week.


In the past two weeks I've also co-started a local video game developers group, in which we met for the first time last night. It was a great meet up and not so much in the ways of video game development, but it was a great start to get to know some of the other people involved; I very much look forward to the next class. I've as well found my niche to learn Flash, with another pro-bono project that I'm doing for a good cause in which I get to characaturize an aquaintance of mine. I can't give away too much on that yet, but new news to follow I'm sure. Definately exciting and busy times!