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.