Thursday, June 17, 2010

These Pretzels Are Making Me Thirsty

Soo I've decided to tackle a new dialogue piece and over the past week and a bit it's coming along quite nicely. I chose a clip from Best in Show that I became obsessed with and decided to use Kyle Balda's rigs from 3D World for a change of pace. All in all, I quite like them, tho no rig is perfect, but it will add some nice variety to my reel as well.

Blocking:


Splining:


The shot still requires a fair bit of finesse, that's where I'm at now and will be a fair bit of fun to add. At present, it's my plan to finish this, my werewolf shot, polish my other dialogue and short film pieces and create a new reel lickety split, as even though my old reel isnt that old, my quality is improving beyond what I think it accurately depicts. A fair bit of work left to get this done, but I'm motivated and working hard at it so indeed it shall!

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Updates, Updates

Where to start. I worked on the Kools for about 3 weeks and did my best to bang out 5 shots. Unfortunately Lightwave did not like running in particular on my computer and I was suffering from many graphical errors. I made good progress on those shots, but I wasn't able to polish anything as it was literally impossible to add that kind of finesse. I know Lightwave is a frustrating piece of software to begin with, but Newtek could only offer upgrading to a better graphics card as a viable solution and I wasn't prepared to do that. Nonetheless, it was much fun and Mr. Bazley was an excellent director to work for.

I moved on to another NDA project which helped get me my XSI legs back. Unfortunately, scheduling problems may call for them needing me in the future as to right away, but I'm rather stoked about that project, it's very neat. On top of that, this gives me the opportunity to go back to completing my short film. With those other two projects, I got distracted and neglected to finish my submission for the spline doctors contest, I did spline it, but I didn't give it that level of polish I wanted and thus, did not enter it. I will wait for the next one. Sooo thusly is my plan to really finish my short film now. With a few months hiyatis from it, I've come back with a set of very fresh eyes and am able to apply the new things i've learned from the new shots I've accomplished. Progress so far is promising.




This is my immediate plan: finish short film, accomplish new dialogue piece and polish a new reel for Siggraph at the end of July, not necessarily in that order. I feel rejuvenated and, although the job market is less than ideal at the moment, I just have to keep pushing forward and something will come my way. Every week I can feel my eye and skills improving just a little bit, so at least I know I'm moving in the right direction.

In terms of the new dialogue clip; I wanted to do something Fred Willard at first, but in my search, I came across this awesome piece from Best In Show:

Since I have legit copies of the Kyle Balda rigs from that issue of 3D World Magazine, it would be so rich to use them for this piece and offer a lil extra diversity to my reel. A nice little bit of more subtle acting, I can't do the whole thing obviously, but I am in the process of narrowing it down. I will let you know what I choose.