AM week 2

Week two has just come to an end. All my assignments are completed and I'm feeling pretty good about it. Our assignment was to go to a public place and do some live figure drawing, then pose our digital character Stu in one of the poses we sketched. It worked out pretty well. I completed my goal to do 100 sketches, but I didn't complete my goal of 10 Stu poses. I only did four. I'm not too worried about it though. I spent more time trying to polish the poses that I got and really learned a lot. I was struggling with some silhouette issues but a comment from Alejandro, a second termer, helped me out a lot. Here is what he said.

Jake
I had the same comment las semester and my mentor told me that you are working for animation, so you have to create that negative space by cheating the camera.

He basically (Matthew Russell) told me to rotate the torso, or the camera so the hands go away of the body the most possible. In "closed" poses the camera should be seeing a kind of "side" view, where the arms and hands are out of the body.

Try to put the pose in black and white, so the only visible thing is the silouette. Then ask somebody to look at it and tell them to describe the feeling of the character. If your pose reads, the person will understand it.

I browse my last semester assignments and found something similar to your pose. Check this image and how i rotate the torso and camera to avoid the arms inside the torso the most possible.

http://x12.putfile.com/1/1918045611.jpg

So play with the pose and trick the camera to achive the kind of poses you want.


Alejandro.

Here are some of sketchbook pages and my poses.




This is the pose that has the silhouette problem. I haven't fixed him yet.



I had actually planned to post a lot more but blogger isn't playing nice. Maybe I'll try again latter. My "best" sketch pages are up there. So enjoy.

Animation Mentor Week 1

All I can say is wow. Animation Mentor (AM) is all that I hoped it would be and much more. It has only been the first week and we haven't had a real assignment yet but man oh man it is awesome. The video classes are so packed with info, the are the guest lectures which are awesome, the forum is full of passionate students and animation ninjas, and I have a dedicated mentor to look over my stuff each week.

I've already have an "AH HA!" moment. Even though I haven't set one key or sketch one thumbnail I feel like I've improved through osmosis. My mentor this quarter is Raquel Coelho formerly from Blue Sky, PDI and more and is currently working at Tippet Studios. My class is full of 13 animators that are all excited about animation. It is a great place to learn.

From now on this blog will mainly be a record of my AM experience. Some of my other art will filter through, but I don't want to get distracted with too much jornaling.