AM.2.10 Advanced Timing

Yay!!!! The piece this week ended up coming together much more fluidly than the disaster of the last assignment. I had animation block from the crappiness of the last assignment and couldn't get anything down right on the computer till Saturday afternoon (I think I expended five files just trying to get the first pose to work at all), but with the awesome crits and suggestions of the people in AM forums though, I feel a lot better about this one. Yay, thanks guys! Hmm, the umbrella piece is going to have to be one of those pieces that can't be fixed, but can only be redone...whenever that happens.... I feel sort of guilty that I'm not all gung-ho about going in and re-animating that one, but errhh yea, *maybe* another day.



OOoh, and here's another revision of my push assignment. Mark pointed out that my spacing on the foot drag was strangely linear (hehehe, so obvious in retrospect) and also suggested adding some friction to the feet after the fall. Hmmmm, the effects of the friction are kind of miniscule in this teeny version, but I'm worried that adding some exaggeration there would look hideous in the bigger version. Hmmmmmmm, now that I'm looking harder I feel like the overlap of the legs in first half of the slip feels strangely floaty and linear as well...gotta fix that next.

Leggo My Ego

In our Q&A just now, Mark told us about this assignment he had back in school to draw a simple cube/roll-of-tape still life. The assignment itself was very simple, but they were set up with 3-6 hours of studio time a day for three straight weeks to work on it. So of course, everyone's laboriously polished their drawings and grown completely attached to their intricate work by the end of it.

Then they were told to.erase.their.work...every.single.line.

WOW. How's that for a lesson in getting too attached to a piece? Hitting delete is already so painful, how cruel is that to have to consciously erase every line?! That's waaaay too much time to think about it and let it sink in.

So uhhhhh, yea, while the class was cracking jokes about poisoning the instructor with eraser shavings, Mark talked about the importance of taking your ego out of the equation and getting to really incorporating direction into meeting the challenges of your piece. It's important not to fall into the traps of getting too attached to change anything or feeling so grudged against taking direction that you act like "Oh, you want the arm higher. There, that's higher," but to really understand how to take the direction you're given and build something out of that. Hahaha, ok, Mark described it waaaaay more eloquently and less obviously, but you get the point.

Man, I hope I never get that assignment.

Yard Art. Ants. Baby Powder

http://www.readymademag.com/feature_6_sodcouch.php

Hahahaa, I laughed when I first saw this do-it-yourself article, but I think it'd be awesome if my landlady and landlord built one of them in their yard.

Actually, I just recently realized how much people around here love doing yard work. My land-people are exemplary. Even though they live four or five hours away, they actually drive down here every other weekend or so to plant more pear trees and rearrange their flowerbeds. It's fun to have them around since they get so happy swapping their plants around. When they call me, it's always to ask if it's rained recently and whether their lawn needs more watering. The inside of the house is no exception. I water all the household plants for them about twice a week and the last time, I started wondering why the heck it took me so long. Out of curiosity, I started keeping track of how many there were as I watered them and lost count around seventy. Wow, no wonder we've got lots of spiders. And then there was the day that one of the household plants got invaded by literally thousands of ants. Oooh! I haven't told you guys about this one yet, have I?

Once upon a day, I was crossing the family room when my peripheral vision noticed a black, moving mass where a spider plant (I know, fitting name) on a pedestal usually was by the front door. The last time I saw a black, moving mass, it covered all four walls, the ceiling, and the floor of a bathroom in Taiwan ~ but that's a cockroach story. So anyways, google tells me that ants apparently like to drink water. And seeing as it had been about a hundred degrees outside for the prior week or so without any rain and I'd just watered the spider plant a couple hours before, they'd all decided to mass migrate to this little paradise of standing water in the air-conditioned shade. These guys were having a freaking party in the corner. It was crazy! I've never seen that many ants at once in my life. In grossed-out panic, I put on a pair of cleaning gloves, threw the front door wide open, grabbed the writhing mass, and chucked the entire thing outside ~ gloves, pot, plant, ants, all. I lost some brave gloves that day.

*intermission for freaky jumpy dance to get all ants off self*

Then I had to deal with the pedestal, which was still scrambling with ants. HA, now they were freaking out a lot more than I was, MWAHAHAA. After figuring out the pedestal was too heavy to chuck outside, I decided to just leave them and hope they'd all go home since there wasn't any paradise left. Fortunately they didn't figure out there was a paradise clone a couple feet away, but unfortunately, they did decide to start climbing up the walls. So then google also tells me that ants can't get a grip on baby powder. I grabbed a bottle and started mass dumping it everywhere around the point of invasion and throwing it over all the walls. And amazingly, it worked! Whenever they got to the baby powder, the ants would scramble for a bit as they lost traction and then fall to the floor. After a couple tries, they gave up, went home within the hour, and haven't been back since. Wow, that worked waaaay better than all those costly ant baits I've put out in the past. So ummm, yea, baby powder!

AM.2.09 Staging and Composition

ARGhhhhHHHHh!!! AGRHHthisGHGisHHHnotGHGgettingHHHHHbetterHhhhH!!!!!!!!!

It's probably a bad idea, but so I'm glad I can take a break from this ugly now, revisit it later, and work on something new.

One of Thoooooose

ARGHHHHHHH!!! That's what I have to say about the last THING I posted ~ it was one of those assignments you just wrestle with forever into passability (argh, that's not even a word) and still doesn't work! ARGHHHH!H!H!H!H!H!H!! It's lack of planning followed by the tendency to just keep trying to beat what you've got into submission when you know it doesn't work and would much benefit from a restart. ARGH! A BSOD might've actually been a blessing this week. So hopefully, this revision of my comparatively better push assignment will redeem some of the crap crappiness I just turned in.

AM.2.08 Advanced Arcs and Paths of Action

ARGHHhhhhHHHHh!!! AGRHHthisGHGHHHsucksGHGHHHHHHhhhH!!!!!!!!!

I Loathe Spiders

I want to be the only living thing within my little renting radius!!! This summer bug explosion is getting outrageous. The week before Siggraph, I killed five different kinds of spiders within three days. I don't even spend much time at home so I only noticed them because they waltzed right freaking in front of me. One of them I accidentally stepped on while walking around with bare feet ~ talk about a nasty surprise! I don't even want to imagine how many more varieties are lurking around where I'm not even looking. So enough complaining, does anyone have any good ideas for killing spiders on a thirty-foot ceiling? There are these two huge uglies (they must be freaking enormous if they look huge already from thirty feet away) who have been getting bigger over the past few months and they're starting to migrate. I'm plotting to murder them before they go somewhere that could produce bad suprises. And perhaps I'm paranoid, but I'm also afraid one of them will start spewing hundreds of children soon. So, I'm super short, have no ladder, only have a four-foot Swiffer, have really bad aim in lobbing objects, and am afraid of these guys. What's my best bet?

Whoa Overdue

Wow, Siggraph was a blast! Sorry for the lack of recent posts ~ I just got back from CA yesterday and am still trying to parse it all. Hahaha, lack of internet almost killed me. So I had no idea what to expect, but meeting the ton of people from AnimationMentor.com and running into old Cornell folks was awesome.

The superb AM events were particularly memorable. There was just so much excitement running through the room. Finally meeting fellow classmates whom I've only known by animation clips and avatars was great ~ it was like finally meeting people you feel like you already know. And watching Bobby, Carlos, Shawn, and a couple of the mentors do their inspiration spiels in person was amazing. AM even brought in Rob Coleman, super animator from ILM, to give a great Q&A session at the Birds of a Feather event. If you haven't heard the details already (or only know the punchline), he told his side of the great story about Shawn trying to pitch his awesome light-saber-throwing-Yoda sequence. When they brought the idea up to George Lucas, he said something along the lines of "Jedi don't throw their light sabers." And of course Shawn in the back goes "Yea they do!" Hahaha, I kind of wish I didn't get the Full Conference pass since then I would have totally spent all my time around the AM booth. Though, then again, the courses and panels were pretty darn amazing. Everyone at AM rocks! I love this program! And thanks Anthea for the extra I-Heart-Spike shirt. You'd be proud to know that it was handy advertising for AM ~ people definitely asked about it!

Running into a bajillion Cornell people was also just crazy. I expected to see two or three people and I figured my old graphics professor would definitely be there, but dang there was a whole posse. We all went to dinner one night and took up five tables! It was great to see people I hadn't seen in over a year and hang out with old friends from graphics courses.

It's kind of weird, but last week made the world feel smaller in a good way. Cheers! Plus, I got lots of hugs!!

Oooh, before I forget, you should check out La Migration Bigoudenn at http://alexandre.heboyan.free.fr/film.htm if you haven't already. It was one of my favorites from the Electonic Theater. I love crazy, cute little shorts. Plus, this one totally reminded me of Zelda Windwaker. Ok, time to catch up on some sleep now -.-

AM.2.07 Pantomime

I wasn't able to watch the lecture for last week till today :(

Eeek, this piece is so rough and horribly unrefined. On the plus side, people have been giving me lots of crits and with the lecture, now I have more thoughts on how to approach this, yay! I had trouble uploading though, so I'm really hoping that Mark can still get an e-critique in.

*crosses fingers*

So far, this is our first piece with the greatest creative leeway so it was great to check out all the ideas people have come up with. Usually we're given a specific topic ~ like animate a push or a walk. This time, we just had the guideline to run Stewie through a situation consisting of four emotional poses: relaxed, alert, engaged, rejected/disgusted. I spent this morning cruising the campus and the variety of great ideas people have come up with is amazing. Everyone's so creative!! Not to mention the quality of poses have really improved since we all started at AM. Wow, having not cruised the campus in ten days or so makes the drastic rate of improvement that happens each week for everyone so obvious! Hahahaha, I'll be playing catchup. Being able to watch everyone's progress on this assignment is going to be great!

AM.2.06 Force

Hmmm, so for the sake of completion I'm back-posting the two assignments I couldn't get enough internet time to link up during Siggraph. Here's my half-polished push piece. Eeek, it's actually slightly embarrassing looking at it now, but I guess that means I've got plenty of ways to improve.



By the way, awesome lecture fom Wayne Gilbert on thinking about force and informative thumbnailing techniques. Anyone interested should order his book Simplifed Drawing for Planning Animation.