Upcoming posts

Guess what I did today? I ordered a new computer. No! YES! Finally I will be able to animate again at home! I'm really excited about this. Even though it's hard to come home after work, live life with your family and deal with non-work stuff and THEN animate again, I feel like it is a necessary thing for me to do in order to keep my animation muscles active (the ones I don't use as much at work).

What does this mean? Well, first of all I can catch up on my No Continues work, but I can also finally finish my workflow demo, which is really long overdue. It will be interesting to see how the final shot will differentiate from the original vision (I had plenty of time to think about the shot and I'm planning on changing a few little things). This post will still take some time (despite the new and faster pc), because I want to present it in a nice way, with lots of comparison and individual stage-of-completion movie clips.

Another post will be about polish and how I try to take assignments/shots to the next level. Basically it serves as a guide to my students in terms of how the progression from an F graded shot to an A graded shot looks like. Arrogantly assuming that my final product is an A of course...

The next one will require your help. I want to build up a post which lists common pitfalls (with example clips) animators face when they start their animation path. Basically dos and dont's for bouncing balls, cycles, etc. It's one thing when you hear me rant about it, it's another when you actually see it. Plus I can use it in class for demos since it's difficult time-wise to do full on demos from scratch plus critiques for 20 students.

Last but not least, demystifying the graph editor. I frequently see beginning students struggle with the graph editor and a lot of times it feels like they concentrate too much on fixing the curves in the graph as opposed to planning and thinking about their poses and timing of the characters in their shot in the first place. Yes, the graph editor is a great tool, but it's not the holy grail. Especially at the beginning when you are taking your first steps learning animation, you can do the assignments without touching the graph at all. So for this post I want to do different little clips, some without using the graph editor and others with graph work only. And this is where you come in. I will hold a contest where you will have to figure out which ones are using a with-graph and without-graph approach. The winner will receive the "Art-of Wall-E" or "Art-of Kung Fu Panda", their choice. :)

That's it for now!
Cheers
Jean-Denis