A Blog: Neglected

Posted January 18, 2011 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

This is exactly what I had set out NOT to do, and that was neglect this guy. A mix of lethargy and business has kept me from keeping up with this, but I stand before my non-existent readership pledging to once again keep up with weekly posts on my progress.

What comes next is a quick summary the last few weeks of class and where I’m at now.

The remaining weeks of Class 01 went by really quickly and my plate was pretty full from week to week. A few more Stu poses and several more movement studies with the Ballie rig and suddenly I was saying goodbye to Scott, my mentor. What an awesome guy! I wish him the best and hope that I get to work with him or under him at some point down the road.

Now it’s Class 02! It’s Psychology of Body Mechanics now, and it’s already shaping up to be a really fun term. Instead of weekly small assignments we now have pick lists to choose from and each assignment is split into 4-week chunks for planning, blocking, revising and a final pass. For my first assignment I picked to do a 180-degree turn with Ballie, and it’s coming along pretty well.

I have a big list of ideas I’ve compiled for different exercises I want to work on, but all of a sudden I’m getting requests all over the place to help out with small game projects and potential design work through Best Buy, where I’m working to pay my animation school bills.

My friend Matt recently released an iPhone game called Rhythm Control, and it’s a ton of fun! Anyone interested in rhythm games of any kind deserves to check it out, it’s only about 2 bucks. There’s a small possibility that I may be taken on as the new artist for revisions of the project, so here’s hoping it does really well!

It’s already in the top 25 apps in Japan and the #1 music game in Sweden, so that’s a start!

I’ve also been working through a game design itch and have been writing up a couple of design documents for projects I’d like to tackle at some point in the next year or two. I’ll be whipping up a Game Design tab for my blog where I can spit and spew about my own projects here once I have a free bit of time, so I’m pretty excited about that.

The only other news is that my main site has been a little neglected too and I’m working towards getting it up to date a little more. That means finishing up the animations in my About page and throwing up all of my work so far from AM into my gallery so it feels far less barren.

I’m a little amused how I’ve revised the site to be a home for my animation work, but I just don’t really much to show in that field yet. I’ll have plenty more to show as school continues, but right now it’s kind of lonely.

That’s it for now, I’ll post up my progress with Ballie later on this week — he’s mid-blocking right now and it’s really not impressive enough to show just yet.

Week 04-05-06

Posted November 9, 2010 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

The last couple weeks have flown by in a haze without updates.  I got sick for about a week of that, and other parts of life got in the way and putting together a little blurb was the last thing on my mind.  To anyone that actually reads this, sorry!

Here’s a quick play-by-play for each week

Week 03 (cont.)

This was my Stu pose that never made it into last week’s post.  Our assigned emotion was “Excitement”

Week 04

week04_final01

We had to take week 3′s assignment to the next logical step and add some weight to the bounces.  One heavy and one light, with a little interaction mixed in.  Here’s how mine turned out:

Week 05

obstacle_final01

Finally, squash and stretch!  I was aching to get to this point since before classes started, and I had a ton of fun with this one.  The biggest challenge was to actually get what I wanted to accomplished crammed into the 120 frame limit.

Our Stu pose for Week 5 was “Devastation”.

Week 06

week06_final01

This was the first week where I was finally starting to struggle with some of the content.  The entire purpose of this one was to demonstrate what we learned about overlapping/offset motion, and timing was what I got hung up on the most.  It didn’t help that I waited until Thursday to really sink my teeth into it either.

That’s the short and sweet version.  I’m doing what I can to get back on an update schedule for my blog alongside my Sunday deadlines for class too.  We finally get to work with our first real “character” this week, so I’ll no doubt lose my entire week to this next one.

(I still need to figure out a workaround for this misadventure in embedding video.  I may just have to stick to straight HTML).

Week 03

Posted October 14, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Exhausted, fresh out of the car from a 7+ hour road trip back home and what’s the first thing I do?  Boot up Maya.  I think that could be considered a good sign — Either that or addiction.

Anyway!  Week 3 is halfway done!

It’s a ball bounce this week, and I’ve already put it through two passes, so here’s where I stand right now:

ballbounce_02

(embedded video clip coming when I can find out why WordPress is doing this)

We’re mimicking a basketball for this, and I think I’ve got something pretty good going so far.  I’ll probably tweak it up through the rest of the week, but I still have a few sketchbook assignments to work out first.

My bed is going to feel awesome tonight.

Week 02, take 2

Posted October 12, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Week 2 down!  I ended up getting really into the assignment once things got rolling and went above and beyond what they wanted out of me, but I just couldn’t stop.  The feedback from everyone was amazing, and it was great to be able to track opinions and suggestions across multiple students (and another mentor, even) to narrow down exactly what each pose needed.

Here are the final poses I ended up with:

Other than the original pose I started the week out with, I’m really happy with how they turned out.  By the time I got to the last one, my efficiency had skyrocketed and it was a lot easier to figure out in my head exactly where the line of action was going to travel before I even started posing.  Good stuff!

This week’s lecture covered different methods of planning and blocking our shots, which is definitely where I need the most practice.  I love to just dive right in, but it ends up wasting a lot more time than if I had spent even 10 minutes sketching out where I wanted to take it.

I’ll post up a video of what I’ve put together so far, but I need to get some rest.  I’ve gotta be up in 4 1/2 hours to drive out to Chicago for a memorial service for my Aunt that passed away a few weeks ago.  I’ll be back Wednesday!

Week 02

Posted October 8, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

I got a little break right out of the gates — we didn’t really get any kind of assignment other than to get comfortable with the website in the first week so I didn’t have anything to update with.

This week we covered all of the twelve basic principles of animation.  As many times as I’ve read through the principles in all of the different books on animation that I own, I always pick up something new when someone new goes over them.

It’s so easy to get caught up in the thrill of working on a shot and their own intricate details that it’s easy to gloss over the important foundations that make animation what it is.  I especially struggled with this going through my undergraduate years, since we went two full years without even a mention of what the principles are.  Once they DID cover them with us, I don’t think they really stressed the importance of them and how they work together that it all just sort of went over our heads.  We got caught up in doing everything else besides the animation that when it came time to animate, we were flying blind.

Anyway!  Our assignment for the week was to get out and people watch.  I went to the Ridgedale mall and sat around half a dozen places just waiting for people to do something interesting and got about a dozen sketches done before deciding to call it a day.

After that, we decided to pick the strongest pose out of the bunch and translate it into 3D using Stu.  He’s a neat, simple little rig meant to ease people into working with control curves in 3D.  I fought with it a while, but came up with this:

It’s not perfect yet, and I’ve already gotten some good feedback by my classmates, but I think it’s a pretty good start.  I’ve been consciously trying to focus on silhouette and line of action, but somehow ended up breaking the strong line I had just before I decided to upload it.  Oh well!  I have a few more days to go back and make it work.  I wish Stu didn’t have mittens..

It begins!

Posted September 30, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

I’m officially an Animation Mentor student! Classes began this week, and I couldn’t be more excited. My first Q&A session happened last night with Scott Lemmer, an animator at Blue Sky. So far he has worked on Ice Age 3 and is in the process of working on their next feature film “Rio”. So awesome! He also animated on Bolt for Disney, and had a short stint at Pixar working on a Finding Nemo interactive ride for Disney…land? World? Something like that.

I’m already anxious to get my feet wet, but this week didn’t have much assigned to us. It gave me the time I needed to wrap up the big changes on my website though, so that will be going up sometime tonight.  I’ll start throwing up my weekly progress here as things go on and with some luck I’ll keep to a fairly regular update schedule.

This is gonna be great!  More to come later.  Gotta finish this website.

A work-in-progress

Posted September 19, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Since I just opened this blog, things are still getting cleaned up, moved around and stitched together. Once my assignments begin rolling in, I’ll start posting my progress here along with anything else that I might be doing on any given day. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve done this, so it may take me a while to get used to updating a blog again.

Keep checking back for updates and take a look at my main portfolio page here: pauljarvis.net. Some elements of each page are interactive, so play around!