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ANOTHER UPDATE FROM SIMON TAYLOR ON HIS ANIMATOR MENTOR PROGRAM

Greetings one and all!

So as I wander into the final week of my penultimate term at Animation Mentor I thought this would be a good moment for a blog entry. I'm currently on the train on my way to work typing this on my phone though so I will do my best to quality control my mistypings and bizarre predictive text choices! Trains are brilliant places to observe people, there are certainly a few poses and character traits that I'm going to save for a future shot! Although right now there appears to be mainly varations on sleeping. The evening rush hour is great too, pleanty of variations of walks and runs! These are definitely my new favourite source of inspiration. I've also recently started accumulating footage for my own video reference library and I've discovered a brilliant source is the news as you get (most of the time) 100% natural moments from people.

As I had anticipated (and pleanty of people warned me!) working as a full time animator and Animation Mentor student at the same time has proved tough, although so far it's been doable. I'm not feeling burned out by constantly animating either, in fact I feel even more enthusiastic about it, everything feels more real now that I can say I'm working as an animator! I think it may also help that the animation I do at work is a different style to that of AM so I get some variation. Hopefully soonish I'll be able to upload some clips of what I've been working on for the last few months.

Our Christmastime AM gathering in London was last weekend which was good fun as always. We saw James Cameron's "Avatar". This was the first live action 3D film I'd seen with the current 3D technology and personally, although I found the visuals absolutely stunning, I was left unimpressed (and mildly headachey!) by the 3D.

In other news, the other week I was lucky enough to see a blogger's preview of Disney's new film "The Princess & The Frog" at Disney HQ in London. Most of the world will be able to see this over Christmas but we don't get it over here in the UK until February, so it was a real privilege! Everybody in the audience absolutely loved it, it was so good to have Disney back doing 2D again and of course it was fun to see my Class 4 mentor T.Dan Hofstedt in the credits. The film really proved what a mistake it was to shut down 2D animation. The story, songs and characters were all first class, it brought back such fond memories of being a little boy, seeing films like Aladdin and Beauty and The Beast in the cinema. It felt like they had infused the film with the spirit of everyone's favourite Disney moments but created something completely new, I hope it does well.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to a little bit of rest from animating for the next week and a bit and then I'm back at Animation Mentor for my final term as well as Impossible TV to start on a new series. I suppose I had better get off the train now as my station's coming up!
Happy New Year!
Simon