Search form

Animation Mentor assignment

19 posts / 0 new
Last post
Animation Mentor assignment

Hi All. I finally got around to uploading my animation to my site of my Animation Mentor homework. This is my second assignment for the Basic Acting class at AM. This is my rough blocking stage to work out some of my staging and golden poses, with a little eye acting thrown in. http://www.animatedape.com/acting_wk7.2.html

CC always welcome.

Mahalo,
the Ape

Animated Ape's picture

...we must all face a choice, between what is right... and what is easy."

...we must all face a choice, between what is right... and what is easy."

Week two on my second acting assignment

This is the second week on this assignment. http://www.animatedape.com/acting_wk8.html
So this is my first blocking pass in Maya in stepped mode. So it's mostly the golden pose with some keys, as well as antics and overshoots put in.

Oh, so a little bit about this assignment. This "semester" we were given a fully skinned character model with limited facial controls. Basicaly we can move the eyes around, adjust the pupils and irises, make the brow go up and down, move the eyelids and move the "flap mouth," think muppets. No mouth shapes, just open and closed. Oh, we also got all five fingers this semester instead of 3 fingers per hand.

So this assignment we had to pic an audio clip on our own. The first assignment we could pick audio clips they provided. I'll post those soon as well. They wanted our audio clips to have good acting in it, around 10 seconds long, and not be one of those over done audio clips on the web. Like audio clips from "The Big Lebowski."

CC welcomed.

Mahalo,
the Ape

...we must all face a choice, between what is right... and what is easy."

Ahhh... Spline hell

My third week on this assignment.
http://www.animatedape.com/acting_wk9.html

I moved into spline mode at this point. I haven't gotten to do the break down poses on most of this shot. I was mostly working on getting the eyes to work right. Now that I see it moving and I'm going to re-adjust some of the timeing of the poses, as well as work on the spacing of the inbetweens. That'll be helped with breakdown keys. Right now it's on 4's. Hopefully it'll start to look better as I bring it down to 2's and have more control of the inbetweens. I've got two more weeks to make this sing, so I've got a bunch of work ahead of me.

Mahalo,
the Ape

...we must all face a choice, between what is right... and what is easy."

I can't view anything. There is a big quicktime symbol with a questionmark in the middle. Ironically, I'm on a mac. I tried safari and firefox. I'll try on a windows pc sometime today.

Hi Doc. Yeah, sorry about that. Macs always seem to have problems viewing my clips. Probably my crappy html lack-o-skills. Also try upgrading to the latest version of Quicktime, but you'll most likely have better luck on a PC. Thanks for trying though.

Mahalo,
the Ape

...we must all face a choice, between what is right... and what is easy."

oh my ..is that Garden state??
AHAHAHAH
one of my fav..no..MY favorite movie of that year!!
Awesome

I'm stoked you chose that scene,,,it is such a hard one to do in animation..
so far, the blocking seems Ok..but it is really too rough at this point for me to see any thing other than..'looks good"

I want to see where you take it, how you make that character BE a character.

Go ape, go!

..

and stop picking at elephants!!
(^__^)

and stop picking at elephants!!
(^__^)

Thats like asking a bird not to fly. :P

Thanks Pascal. Yeah, I'm going to have to breath some major life into this character in the next couple of weeks. My real challenge is to make it look like the lines are coming from the character naturally, and not just saying them. Know what I mean? It's such a fine line. It's due next Sunday so I should have enough time to fiddle with it.

Mahalo,
the Ape

...we must all face a choice, between what is right... and what is easy."

Here is this past weeks assignment:
http://www.animatedape.com/wk10_acting_done.mov
This is the second to the last pass on this assignment. So here I was just working out the facial acting as well as putting in the lip-sync and texturing some of the timing. There still are a few pops here and there, and I still want to mess around with the timing in a few spots. It's pretty close to being done, just a bit of noodling now.

I think I need to take a bit of a break from it so I'm going to go back and revise my previous assignment, and hopefully I'll be able to see the problem areas with this one a bit more clearly.

Let me know what you all think. Critiques and comments are always welcome, even if they're from strange French dudes. :P

Mahalo,
the Ape

...we must all face a choice, between what is right... and what is easy."

I finally got to see your work and very nice job. The body language was well done. It makes me wonder which is harder, large animated motions or small and suttle animation.

Thanks Wontobe. Yeah, I finally figured out I can just link to the actual .mov file and don't have to make a whole page to view it in. Told you I suck at html junk. :P

For me, subtle acting is way harder, esspecially in 3D. It's a real challenge for me to keep the character "alive" when they are standing still, versus in Flash where I can hold forever and just have the lip-sync and some eye blinks. Thats why I chose this dialogue so I could practice some subtle animation.

Mahalo,
the Ape

...we must all face a choice, between what is right... and what is easy."

same here! finally get to see something! other than stuff ive unkowningly seen watching fosters.

Thats what we learn in 3d. nothing can be STILL. but in 2d when you have stuff be still it is ok a lot of the time.

"who wouldn't want to make stuff for me? I'm awesome." -Bloo

a wee-bit off topic, but...

Apeman!

How you digging that-there Maya thang?

Just downloaded the PLE... I'm afraid! ;)

(Your own 3D animations are improving greatly!)

Splatman:D

Hiya Splat. I'm liking the Maya thing quite well. I still have a hard time when the character is motionless, but I really like it. The AM guys and gals really found a great way of teaching animation. They don't overwhelm the students and it works great.

Aloha,
the Ape

...we must all face a choice, between what is right... and what is easy."

Yep, it looks good...

I like how someone can still hold down a job while doing the AM thing, and the connections one could make are exceptional!

Now if only I could talk The Boss (My loving Wife!) into letting me do it!:o

Splatman:D

Best money ever spent Splat. This is the best animation education I've ever had. I would really try to convince your wife if I were you. Several students have already been hired on at studios. Two at Disney Feature, one at Blue Sky and several as some game studios. I know that the two that got in at Disney didn't even apply, one of the recruiters saw their work, and asked them to come in for interviews. Currently they are on Wilbur Robinson. These are two friends of mine, but I'm not sure how the others got hired. $2000 per 12 week class? Animation schooling doesn't really get much cheaper than that. Good stuff.

Aloha,
the Ape

...we must all face a choice, between what is right... and what is easy."

Well sadly this semester has come to an end. I've learned a ton from my mentor, Jason Ryan and will miss his great advice and animation demos. This is the final version for my second and final assignment for my Intro to Acting class at Animation Mentor. http://www.animatedape.com/wk11_acting_done.mov

This version uses the new H.264 compressor so if it doesn't work, you may have to download the newest version of Quick Time. If that doesn't work for you, try this version that uses the Sorensen3 compressor.

http://www.animatedape.com/wk11_acting_done2.mov

Comments and critiques are always welcome.

Mahalo,
the Ape

...we must all face a choice, between what is right... and what is easy."

VERY NICE ape!!!

So.. this is it.. this is the end of animation mentor for you or is there more after that?

from what i'd seen of yours and what you are showing now... the improvement on the character acting is quite impressive!!!

Congratulations on that!
(^__^)
P.

Yessir!

Best one yet!

Splatman:D

Thanks Pascal. There is one more class left which is advanced acting. There there are two more classes after that to develope our short films. I hope we have more assignments next semmester. Five weeks for each assignment was a bit long. I think if we have three that would be good. Next semester we get a fully rigged face. That should be fun. I plan to work on a few things over our Xmas break. Just so I don't forget everything. I'll post them up here.

Mahalo,
the Ape

...we must all face a choice, between what is right... and what is easy."