11 Second Club February Results!

Hi Everyone, it's that time again. After a long hiatus for the holidays, I jumped back into the 11 Second Club competition for February. This month was a very active clip from Garden State, and certainly challenging. It's been a long time since I've attempted full body mechanics, my last two submissions being mostly from waist-up, so it was intimidating, but fun to tackle. With a short month, and many things going on, it was not easy to stay focused on this daunting endeavor, but managed to get through, and ultimately finished 14th place out of 191 entries, tied with my highest ranking ever. Here is a look at the breakdown pass:

Did quite a few breakdowns to really describe the movement of the dance, and her active explanation that follows. Now, here is the final piece:

And that is that! Again, been getting great feedback from colleagues and DreamWorks Animators to which I'm very thankful for, their input is a huge help. Now I shall take my hiatus month and hopefully jump back in again in April! Thanks for watching!

Rhythm & Blues

I received my annual "we got your reel and we're checking it out" postcard from Rhythm & Hues today. I should start making a wall out of these things! And now I play the waiting game again. Animation gods have mercy!

Character Animation Exercise

This past week I completed a personal character animation exercise. It had been just a little bit over a year since I had animated anything, and decided it was time to get loose again. It also made for a nice additional dialogue piece to stick on my animation reel for Rhythm & Hues to look at. The final animation can be viewed here.

I had been reading about Keith Lango's Pop-Thru Animation technique for 3D animators and thought this would be the perfect opportunity to try it out myself. Up until now I used either straight-ahead animation technique in 3D or a kind of linear-tween pose-to-pose method. I must say, both feel incredibly inferior and wasteful after using this alternate method. The feeling achieved through this pop-thru method feels very much like rolling or flipping in 2D animation and as Lango mentions in his article, is designed to bring the focus back to posing and timing.

I understand that most major studios employ this method as a way to get maximum efficiency out of their animation department since it allows animation supervisors to get a feel for what their animators are doing early in the week, and so changes can be made with minimal waste. If you check out some of the in-progress animation in the Ratatouille video podcast, you can see this method being used in some of their shots.