Siggy Shenanigans and Bish 2.0

Wow! Well Siggraph was indeed a blast, I have the great fortune to have my reel reviewed by both Disney and Nickelodeon, and they were able to lead me in the direction to where to take it next to push it to the next level. I've never felt so close at this point, however juxtapostionally still far away. My lack of industry experience is still a hindrance, but that's just another hurdle to overcome. I also moved downtown after returning from Siggraph and moved in with my belle, a bit of an exhausting month but back at it.

My new shot is still a work in progress, but after watching a documentary on the world's tallest man I felt inspired to try and animate a guy with crutches. This was also a good excuse and first test with Bishop 2.0. A bit of backward working, but I chose an audio clip from Firefly that I thought made for an interesting character; A physically weak man and yet quite clearly powerful. we'll see how it comes along in the next few days but as it is...

For Some Reason I'm Being Commented With Japanese Erotica

And for that I sincerely apologize so do not click on those links. I have no idea why I've been targetted for this, but I'm at a lack for not caring enough to astutely do anything proper about it. Maybe later, but I have bigger fish to fry and more important concerns.

My biggest accomplishment for the last couple weeks was revamping my demo reel, updating my resume and format of my website. I can start to reapply to studios I have applied to before in the past, but largely this is all in preperation for Siggraph. I will be down there for 4 days, mostly for the job fair, so I'm making sure I am absolutely prepared. Feel free to check it out at www.dylanimation.com. I would like to get one more shot that I'm happy enough with to put on my reel so I will work on that. The later half of July is becoming increasingly chaotic, but I'm sure I can make it all work.

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!

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.

Platitudes and Shenanigans

A super busy couple weeks as I keep pushing forward and honing my skills. So far, I've done 3 weeks of alumni tutoring, and results have been much better than expected. Far more students in attendance and classes go far in overtime, it's been a great experience. As well, the Werewolf shot evolves and somehow gets somewhat closer to completion but so much more work to do on it. I changed the ending since I didn't like him jumping down a cliff so now it's over a crevice. Since the whole thing is a quadraped body mechanics exercise, it's a little more suited, but I can't explain enough how much I've learned from doing this shot. More polish yet to comes, I stress THIS IS NOT FINAL:


As well I started working on a new shot for the Spline Doctors competition, and I have 6 days to whip that off. It's far more achievable so I'm sure I can do it, but still quite challenging. Basically it's a stylized walk, and there were many different themes to approach it with, I chose the 1970s theme and decided to go with a pimp strut. Lot of fun pimping up bishop and managed to get a pass done on the blocking, I'll see what I can do to finish it lickety-split.



More importantly though, I'm on a project!! Yea that's right, I am working for Bazley Films in the UK on a Kool project (The Kools) for the next little while. It involved learning Lightwave and so far so good. It's been and interesting experience, but I don't have too too much to report yet, and doubt I should release any WiPs from that so I won't. Progress! :D

Also super recently I was able to attend GDC Canada with an awesome press pass courtesy of VancouverAnimation and the work I do on the webcomic for that site. I guess I have somewhat of a fanbase but GDC was an amazing experience. I'd like to think I did a lot of good networking, but only time will tell, hehe.

Hello My Nugglets

So started P9oX last week, sticking with it and feeling great, exhausted but great. This is exactly what my sedentary lifestyle needed at the moment, I could literally feel my legs atrophying. If anything, it's entirely possible it's helped my focus a little more too, but maybe that's cuz i'm also eating healthier or seeing some things animationwise I hadnt seen before. Either way, it's progress baby! And that's all I can do at the moment, is really hone my skill.

With that said, I've decided to start working on my creature shot finally; now that I've managed to become solid on an idea. At best this is really a body mechanics test, but nothing beats a nice wolfie run through the forest. Some mild humanoid elements but I think they shall be minor as I learn some of the limitations of the rig. So in the blocking phase and really trying to understand the mechanics of quadrapeds, it's simply a fantastic exercise for that, if not daunting and occasionally mind bending, but I have good hope on my success with this.



Progress continues on the development of my new super live action/CG short film; I forgot how much the conceptual phase could be; and sooo thankful I actually decided to read McKee's "Story" book. I did my second proof of concept test simply to have a better understanding of the technical challenges I'll be needing to overcome, as I've never really done any live plate animation before. I can't thank my wonderful girlfriend enough for allowing me to shoot her and use her as the subject matter for this test. 3D matchmoving, marker removal and animating to a live camera... mostly successful.



And in other slightly related news, I had my first alumni tutor session last week... that's right, as a tutor! Yes, the powers that be deemed that I am mature enough to aid the students once a week via webcam with my own hour of awesome QnA, and all I can say is that it was a blast. It went on for 3 hours and there were 15-20 people that stayed for the whole length of time... who knew. Maybe the current students are just really really bored but I'm glad the alumni sessions are growing in popularity and it's definitely a nice way to give back to the community that helped me out so much. :D

The Cherry Blossoms Are Out!

Just a quick update; it's been a month of computer problems, sprained wrists, emergency family trips, apartment relocations and new girlfriend so I guess I got caught up with life. With that said, I did manage to enter my animation in the 11second club for March, though not quite as polished as I would ideally have hoped, but here it is;
Made the 22nd percentile, woowoo! Had I put a little more TLC into it who knows how much better it might have done. I've decided though, not to do the 11 second club this month and instead spend my time testing out new shorter acting pieces I've been wanting to try. First up is a Sammy Davis Jr. piece that's still in blocking.

Also, considerable work and development has begun on a new short film (I know, what about my old short film) but this will be a live action/CG hybrid in conjunction with an actor friend of mine. The nice part also is that I'll get to try a bunch of things I've never really done before like animating to a live plate, etc. Without going into detail, I've had some good fun doing some rudimentary concept sketches, here are but a few.

The Days Are Longer Again!

What an interesting couple weeks of ups and downs and not as much progress as I would like to have hoped for, but oh well, these things happen. I wiped out on my bicycle in some morning snow and sprained my wrist, not a serious sprain, but enough to hinder my animation progress to be sure. As well as suffering from a few computer related issues which will lead to a backup and reinstall as soon as this blog entry is done. So in terms of animation, I guess my greatest accomplishment was really hashing out, modelling and blocking my shot for the March 11 Second Club competition. I was able to give it a few passes and get a nice block-plus going and will begin splining early next week. If you're curious, feel free to check out the video below:



Other than that, I was able to experiment with the new werewolf creature rig and test it out to see it's limitations and how the controls really work. Basically just a run cycle but it was pretty eye-opening as to how to approach the real shot I want to do. So this is a gallop run done with the werewolf, admittedly it's meant for a lighter dog, but as I mentioned, it taught me an awful lot about the particulars of the rig and quadraped mechanics in general. I've been archiving footage from Twilight, Underworld, National Geographic etc to help narrow down a solid shot I want to do with this and I'm getting ever so close to finding the perfect one, will keep you updated.

This is the close to gallop test, and I stress it was primarily a test.

Game modding work has slowly picked up again, with the transition over to Unreal, I've finally gotten my hands on the rebuilt rigs and have been testing out their limitations as well. Also, due to my apartment being put up for sale by my landlords, I am moving into a quainter place across the bridge at the end of the month. As long as I can get my 11secondclub entry done, then I will be more than satisfied.

February Schmebuary

Wow, pure insanity with the Olympics in Vancouver; it's been a very distracting couple of weeks. I haven't really done much Olympic persay except observe from a distance, I didn't feel like standing in really really long lines, but it was still pretty amazingly cool. I also just finished and submitted my 11second club entry, so I'll be interested in seeing how I do on it. I don't expect to win but it's not really about that anyways. I tried to go heavy on body mechanics with this one and learned alot from doing it. Not really sure if the idea makes sense, but hey, my gut told me to go with it. Here is what I submitted, if you vote, please still vote fairly and accordingly, I have the utmost respect for this competition.



I also chose a werewolf rig from Arconyx as part of my prize from Kenny Roy, I'm bouncing through a few different ideas for that at the moment, but that's my next project, as well as getting back to work on my short film. My Hiatus from it was perfect to give me the fresh eyes I need. Age of Chivalry has decided to switch over to Unreal from Source, in the big picture I suppose it's worth it, but it also means the animations I did for them are useless. Ah well, new models have to be rigged so I get some time off from that. It's all about the best end product and this seems to be leading towards that.

Vive l'animation!

The last two weeks, though officially graduated and currently looking for work, has been busy and hectic, so that's fantastic. I could use this, and I've been tempted believe me, as downtime for a job well done, but I refuse to let that happen for two reasons: a) I'm in a productive routine that might be hard to get back into if I get out of it and b) this animation stuff is really fun anyways. There seems to be lots to keep me busy and keep me working on my skills and the more practice I get in, the more refined my skills seem to get; I guess it's a testament to the never ending learning curve in this industry and I have to admit, nothing excites me more.

I spent the majority of last week working on the uber shot for Mass Animation, which constituted of 16 characters, a bus and 7 seconds, most of which was bullet time. The payoff for this was a substantial reward, but more importantly to be a shining portfolio piece. Sad to say, I didn't win, but that's ok, I won for a game cycle in Phase 2 and already a trailer shot in Phase 1, so it will still compliment my resume nicely. It's funny as the reason I did the game cycle was to have a taste of the gratification of having an animation in game that is used by players, and to be quite frank, I didn't think I'd win that one, so the world works in mysterious ways. Since the competition is officially over, I'll post my uber-shot that I grueled over, as I'm fairly pleased with it, and I imagine I must have been close to winning, hopefully I'll finish polishing this regardless.



It's also been a good week for busting out cycles for Age of Chivarly; I managed to get all my sprint cycles done for the crusader character wielding a flamberge as well as an idle cycle. I'm fairly happy with those too, but I will come back and polish those, for the meantime, it's something to test their functionality in game. Next up on the list is attacks and parries (woo woo!) should be interesting as they are torso only animations, but regardless should be alot of fun. I was hoping to start work on those already, but there was a lot of backend stuff I had to learn (even deconstruct and rewrite code) to get these animations to import into the game properly, a fun challenge to be sure.

And more recently, I've spent the past couple days on and off working on my entry for the 11 Second Club this month. The audio clip this time around is so... unique, it provides such an interesting challenge. I thought of a few different ideas, but I kept coming back to one in my head so I went with my gut instinct on it. At a glance it seems rather weird to me, but with refinement and a properly modelled set, I think it will all come together. Regardless, it is a chance for some super fun and polished animation, but here's my first pass blocking thus far. I plan to spend time this weekend going back and pushing the poses and checking my arcs to see they are on track.

Graduation Blues? Hardly

Well Graduation just happened this last weekend and the only word for it really is... speechless! So many elements of it was fantastic and surreal it's hard to know where to start. The actual ceremony itself was creative and entertaining, done in the style that only Animation Mentor could pull off, but on top of that, meeting most people for the first time that I've only met before through webcam or even text was an amazing experience. Especially being harnessed as such a global community and knowing how far people travelled, just... wow! There was also a career fair the day before in which I was able to introduce myself to numerous recruiters, I consider that to be the most important element rather than simply prospects of finding work, though that plays into it as well. And being able to do all the touristy things that San Francisco offers with friends from literally around the world was just as exciting. 5 days was not long enough.

Although I was nominated for 2 student choice awards, I didn't end up winning either, but I wasn't disappointed, as both people who won them were entirely deserving of those awards. I did however, get to meet up with my last mentor, Kenny Roy who's an awe inspiring individual, but having won his class award, I received a 3D maquette of one of my film characters. All I had to do was send him a pose in a maya file and the rest was his; I plan on painting it, but it was an honor to receive it.

So I guess it's official, I'm now a full fledged alumni, but the work doesn't stop there. After graduation, a group of us got tours of ILM and PDI Dreamworks and both places were just amazing. So many good vibes that I definitely feel rejuvenated on finishing my short film, even sooner than later. So I've begun work on that as well as continued to bust away work for the Age of Chivalry mod I'm part of now. Mostly working on Sprint cycles at the moment, and I'm realizing how challenging cycles can actually be. It is definitely a good test of... well darn near everything and a really good learning experience. Hopefully I'll post something soon.

Also, one of my shots for the new Mass Animation contest was chosen as a finalist and I had a skype call with the director Yair Landau earlier today. Offering me some feedback on how to improve it and getting me set up for working with ReelFX to push it up to finalized production quality. It's a very exciting prospect and I can't wait to start to finish it (sounds ironic I know). I've decided to do one more entry for the DCUO contest, this time a game cycle. If it gets chosen, it would be an interesting sense of achievement seeing some of my animation in game being used by players and NPCs alike.

So all in all, even tho becoming alumni would seem like a bit of a denouement, the animation wheel keeps on turning, and I'm glad I have enough to keep my plate full until the next studio job comes my way. :D

A Whole Decade Later

Huzzah! It's a new year, new decade even, and even better than that, I can proudly display this awesome new logo! That's right, I've graduated, and I am officially an Animation Mentor alumni woohoo! Well, to be fair, the actual graduation ceremony is next week, but barring some absurd technicality, I'm feeling pretty confident I'm a graduate. It was a pretty mad push up to the end, but well worth it's weight in learning and goldness. Though my short film is not complete, I'm feeling happy with the shots I worked on and feel now I have something far more competitive than I did in the past. Plus the relationships I've nurtured over the last year and a half are practically worth it on it's own, socially and otherwise.
The Xmas break was good, but ultimately too short as per usual. I got to go home to see family and also use that time to enter the new Mass Animation DC Universe Online contest. I wanted to challenge myself with one shot, a hard one at that to prevent getting rusty and really, it was the only time I would be able to work on it, as I have quite a full plate going on at the moment. Anyways, working on a laptop for a change was quite the experience, and though I don't feel my shot was complete or as good as it could have possibly been, I gave myself a time restriction and handed it in. I'm not hell-bent on winning, I just wanted to participate as it was a chance to animate Batman, that in itself was worth it to me.
On another front, my work with the Age of Chivalry dev team is ramping up and I'm busy creating cycles for them as well. It's a very exciting project and a fun crew to boot. Already I'm learning alot, including quickly mastering (I'd like to think) 3DS Max, so even another piece of software under my belt. Not sure if I'm allowed to post animations from that, I imagine it's ok, but I'm going to check first.
If you haven't noticed, also I've manage to compile a new reel together on the main page, updated to the max! Unrendered as of yet, but I'll get around to it; I've also had some dynamics simulation problems, mostly with the software crashing, but I'll overcome that hurdle as well.
So in the very least, I guess I can say I'm glad I'm keeping busy in the new year and not allowing myself too much downtime; one resolution I've stuck to so far hehe. Now if I can just keep up more regular blog postings. THE FUTURE IS NOW! :D