i would like to say a big sorry and a big thank you to DJ Nicke, i was looking through my old posts and i noticed that i have never talked about the time DJ came into my University to talk to us about work flow. i believe he came in around the time i stopped writing these blogs so it all on me so sorry dude.
i did take some photos of when he came in so here they are and once again sorry mate.
it was such a great thin for him to do for us all and i know that we all got a lot of great advice from him, he also talked about his new Guardian Program which i can say without a shadow of doubt is a great thing to take part in if you have the money, for news on the guardian program and free tips and tricks please head over to Animation Salvation and sign up for the free news letter as its will help you out so much in your animation and your work flow.
so ye thank you again dude and i hope that we can do something like that again as it was very informative and something that has changed the way i look at my animations and the way i look at my work flow.
So now that thats been mentioned lets get on with the current animation, so as many of you may of may not know i've been doing DJ's Guardian Course for a while now (although it been hard to keep up with it with all my other work load) and i've uploaded a few of them to youtube for you guys to see what i've done.
the first lesson was just to look at videos on breakdancing and study how squash and stretch isn't just a cartoon for of deforming the face or body so that is produces unnatural movement such as this...
image from here
it also relates to crouching down before a jump (squash) and then stretching out to jump (stretch)
so that was lesson one....
for lesson two we talked about Anticipation, im not going to go into to much detail in the posts about the Guardian Course as that would take away from you doing the course yourself. so this what i did for the anticipation lesson.
strangely the thing that took the longest with this was bloody uploading it to the net as uploading a 1 second video was the hardest thing to do ever and it's still never glitchey but ye anyway thats lesson 2, oh and just so you know the lessons are daily with 1 day of rest where you get an email saying day of rest and basically just rest your brain and so something other then animation.
so lesson 3 was the importance of good staging and this one i could really connect with as it was all about the masters of comedy Laural and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin etc. the good thing for me is that i have studied these gods of comedy since i could understand comedy as me and my late granddad use to sit and watch them virtually every day and i picked up a lot from them. so that was really kool to do and to get a refreshers course on.
next lesson was straight ahead an pose to pose action, for me i prefer straight ahead animation as it just give more of a natural movement to the character or object its just that without good planning it end up being a complete mess of splines and curves in the fcurve editor with about a keyframe every 4th frame which is just a total mess.
anyway this is what i manged to pull off, i know that a lot of these videos and animations could be better but for me its really just a good brush up and the further i get through the course the better i will get (hopefully) so just stay tuned for better animation.
Pose To Pose Action
Lesson 5 was all about Follow Through and Overlapping, for me this was really really hard as i haven't ever done anything like this before, now that not to say i haven't done follow through and overlapping before this is that i haven't animated a bone long a sinewave before in this sense so it was very hard but i think i managed it for now but as i said i will get better the more i do it (just like all things).
then it was my day of rest (thank fully as i got time to work on my other projects).
come the next day at 11:55am without delay i got a popup saying Slow In & Slow Out, yep it was a new Guardian email and you guessed it, it was about slow in and slow out and our first bouncing ball animation.
this i have covered many many times before and i haven't had to many problems with it but when i was working to the directions given i found it really hard to stay within the parameters that DJ had said but i think i managed it quite well.
well thats all i have at the moment i have a back log of 14 emails from the course and they come everyday so its hard to keep up with them, i know i should be doing one everyday but i really need to catch up with them and i just love animating so much so i just keep animating and i really can't stop, but then again if you know me well enough you know that animation is my life without it i wouldn't be the guy i am today.
so now that i've talked about the course and about DJ coming in to uni (about 4-5 months ago), lets get onto new people.....ye strange topic maybe but i have met some new people and i feel that i should give these guys a mention in my post.
so who's new and how do i know them, well 2nd question's answer first (have i lost you yet lol) all the guys mentioned are from DJ's (yep this is a DJ blog lol) Community website that i am a member of (check it out here), its a great place to meet and talk to people that are interested in the same things as you (as long as it has to do with animation) we all help each other grow in skills and help to bring to life others ideas for animations by looking at there test work and giving them advice on how to make it better. anyway back to the people, firstly we have a great lass called Chelsey Cline aka Keyfish she's a Animation Major at SCAD-Atlanta and although i have only known her for about a week now i can see from here work that she is well on her way to becoming a great illustrator and animator, im really looking forward to her showreel which she says is on its way to getting started as over the next month she's undertaking a vast amount of animation work at a boot camp, sadly in the UK we don't get animation boot camps, if we did im sure there would be more of us. (would that be a good thing or bad thing though). so ye i would really recommend checking out her profile (thats 3 links to it) and subscribing to her updates.
the other person i would like to talk about it Matthew Finch this guy is really helpful, he started a group on the Community called Rigging 101 now for me this is great thing at this moment in time as i have a lot of rigging to do for my final year project (for next year). so ye as i was saying he made this group but sadly there is no way of talking to each other through it due to some issue that i need to tell DJ about, so i private messaged him and he has been emailing me a load of websites and information that i can use in my rigging which is great of him. so Mathew if your reading this at all thank you so much and if you have any video tutorial at all please could you leave a comment with the link or PM me on the Community. thats actually goes for anyone that might know of a good tutorial for rigging in XSI at all as im in real need of the help as i haven't done it before thanks.
and the last guy i want to talk about i really dont know that much about to talk about him but i'll give it a shot, so i know him through the community again and he requested to be a contact so i thought ye sure why not, anyway his name is Craig Perez and from the looks of his art work on the community he looks like he's got a lot talent. i hope to get to know him more as the community grows and the connections grow stronger.
anyway thats all in my little world of animation, i hope that i will be getting back to my final year project work soon as it getting closer to uni and i really need to get everything sorted before it starts.
hope you all enjoyed reading this as much as i enjoyed writing it and please please please subscribe to my blog from the top left subscribe link it will take you to the RSS and the Google Friends (Follower) option or click on that Subscribe button under here.
so ye go check it out and i'll talk to all again soon.
bye for now guys ^_^
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