Character Animation Demo Reel

New Shot, Fully Animated Character

If my blog was a pet it would have been dead by now, but here i am again, with my first full animated character, and a 10 seconds shot. This past weeks i've really felt so privileged to learn from the best animation school in the world and two of it's amazingly talented mentors, Greg Kyle who is my actual mentor for term 5,  with a gifted brain and an incredible eye for detail. I was really looking to get in his class since term 2, and T. Dan Hofstedt, another great guy from the old school with something like 25 movies in his pocket and an amazing talent, so what i mean is, THANKS a lot for everything!.

I must say i'm happy with this shot  (even if it's not finished yet, i'll do that next term), i can't believe i've gotten this far, and i really feel a sense of accomplishment, like hey! i can do facial animation too!, even if it's not perfect. Still a long way to go, but this my way, i'm an animator, eager to learn more and more.

So, next assignment, two character dialogue shot!, i don't know when i'm going to post again an update for that one, but i know i just want to post refined or polished animation.

The Bus Stop

This is the final version of the shot, remember? the blocking down there two posts before this one? aha that one. I don't think i'll be opening this "stewie_v77.ma" file anytime soon, i'd love to keep polishing this a little more, but i am sick at the moment and don't even know if i'll be able to hand in this week's blocking on time :(. So there it is, with a cute lightning and everything to teel the little story correctly with an added shadow, off to sleep!

The Piano Incident Shot (blocking)

New year, new term, new mentor and new blocking pass, it's nice to finally be in the Introduction to Acting term, i started a little slow but i'm catching up, the shots from now on are the ones supposed to be in my demo reel, i'll try to put at least one or two of my past body mechanics shots in there, like this one,  let's see how this year goes, wish me luck :)

Term 3 Ends!

Great term, great mentor, enjoyed a lot, and am kind of satisfied with the results, but honestly i need a job out of this country, so will be polishing some more maybe while eating my hallacas on christmas. :). Below the final shot for this term semi-polished. Halfway through AM :)

Bottle Lift (Blocking plus)

This is a traditional weight lift exercise, i wanted to do something more entertaining than this, but at least i'm really enjoying working on this one, my mentor is pretty happy with it and that's a good thing. I just discovered with this exercise the power of putting a good amount of effort in the planning and blocking, everything else flows much smoother, hitting the spline button was not painful at all with this one.

"Horror Book" Semi-Polished

Still have to do some corrections my mentor addressed, i think i'll try to do them after the term ends. This animation was very difficult since i didn't have a side video reference, but it came out ok i think. Still needs more polish. Btw, don't ask about the "whatever that is…oh…a convenience piece of furniture he has on his house" as my mentor said". I'll work on it when i get the time, it's not absolutely necessary though.

"Horror Book" (Blocking)

Can't believe i forgot about my little blog, this past few weeks have been the hardest, but also the ones i've enjoyed the most. I did some bad crappy blocking which i had to redo 2 times, but finally i have something i like, still rough of course, it's rough until refined, so as you see i've been failing a lot, and that means i'm learning, wohooo!. I love animation a little more everyday. Oh and there's a blooper somewhere in the shot haha.

Kung Fu Shot Splined

This is the final version of my Kung Fu shot, at least for now, it still needs some work but i ran out of time unfortunately, at least i think it's looking decent, but still needs a little more life, more dragging in some areas, more exaggeration in the poses and maybe some more contrast in timing. Maybe a nice render too, and of course fix the horrible knee pops, but for now i have to move to my next assignment, my "horror book" shot :). Let's see how that goes, i really really want to make this one look awesome.

Shaolin Kung Fu (blocking)

This is my new shot and my first post for term 3!, still very rough, i didn't even put as many breakdowns as i'm used to, but i think it's enough to sell the idea and i got the major keys and breakdowns in there, i'll add more breakdowns and will try to make the poses stronger and refine the timing and spacing more as my mentor pointed out. Overall satisfaction for this blocking = 6.5/10, that means i'll have to work harder this week :).

"Spanish Stewie" Final Render

Here's my "Spanish Stewie" :), like "Spanish Buzz" from TS3, but way less cooler, lol!, this is the final shot rendered, i'm about to start the 3rd quarter and wanted to make a few improvements, and to make Stewie more like a flamenco dancer. Too bad i have to move on, there are still some things i wanted to improve, but i guess that's it for "Spanish Stewie", i really enjoyed working on this assignment.

Flamenco Animation [Update] Class 2 - Week 10

This term is about to end, i have to say that for me it wasn't as fun as the last one, but this has nothing to do with AM, or animation being fun, it's more like some life drawbacks thing, it's getting better though. The important thing is that despite all this stuff, i still want to do this because i love it, and because it's a commitment with myself. I still have this week to make little changes and refine more areas, so we'll see how that goes. Here's the last update, still needs some life on it, maybe i should watch Pinocchio or something, lol.

Flamenco! - Class 2 - Week 9

Booo! i missed my weekly post last week, this is still a blocking phase (blocking plus) from my flamenco animation, it's been hard and fun at the same time, the bad news is that the rig is defective and when i spline the feet act really weird,  many people are having the same issue so we'll see how it goes. I foresee stressful times :S, there's so much to do in this 2 weeks!, but i'll try hard to end up with a decent animation :). Flamencooo!!! weird stuff, i'm appreciating flamenco dance with this project.

Stewie (no arms) Final - Class 2 - Week 5

Here's the final animation polished. I feel this shot taught me many things, for instance, don't try to counter animate controls to fix other messed up ones, that will end up bad in the graph editor, i'm really terrified to look at the graph editor from frames 135 to 160, that's something like bad script in a web site, it could work but inside it's a mess, it's good because i finished it, but bad if i need to make changes afterwards. I'm satisfied in the sense that i think i applied and pushed consciously those animation principles, also because this is my first semi complete character animation (no arms), at the same time unsatisfied because i'm not totally happy with the final result, so i'm gonna have to live with it, or maybe i'll try to push it a little farther later, i really lost objectivity from watching this animation so many times, i don't know if the swinging feels real or fake, or half way there, i just lost it.

I went a little bit coo koo with my idea for the next assignment, a 10 second animation, with a full biped character and...dancing flamenco? yep, dancing flamenco, this is not really my thing but i liked this guy doing this crazy moves in this scene from a spanish movie (from 1:50 min to 2:03), i think somehow Toy Story 3 has something to do with this, it's going to be definitely a challenge, but i'll try my best :)


 

Stewie (no arms) Update - Class 2 - Week 6

This is the "blocking plus" pass, well, it's a little more than that, i started refining a few spots, a lot of changes have to be made, but i have to confess that i really want to finish this animation, it's a little frustrating to redo 50 frames =S, but i'm really not satisfied with that boring ending, also i got to a point where little details are taking forever!. I'll start tomorrow and we'll see how it goes. 

Stewie (no arms) blocking - Class 2 - Week 5

This is last week's blocking, it's still rough of course… it's blocking!, it needs a lot of work for what i have in mind, specially the spine, but i like the starting point i have, i want to push it as far as i can in terms of overlapping, timing, arcs and exaggeration, let's see how that goes. So i'll be waiting for today's eCritique from our substitute mentor for this week, Greg Kyle http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0477379/, to start working on it right away!

Ballie Finished Animation and New Assignment - Class 2 - Week 4

This is the final animation, it's polished, refined etc. I'm not sure about the spacing, my eyes betray me at this point, so i'll have to wait for today's eCritique. I wanted to put some lightning and render this out, but i think i'm going to wait till the quarter is over. Below the animation is my planning for the next project, it's not the final idea, but it'll be something like that. The idea is for "Stewie" (the new character) to be jumping... i don't know what...yet :), i know, seems boring, that's why i'm trying to spice it a bit, there were more fun options to pick, but also difficult, and since this is a new character, (it has like 10 more controls than Ballie, including spine, neck, shoulders, head and eyes), the graph editor can become a spaghetti puzzle, so i think i'm going to stick with this idea which is not as demanding, but the good thing is i can build up from here as time passes and challenge myself in a healthy way. DETAIL is going to be the key word for this new assignment.

Ballie Splined 3/4 - Class 2 - Week 3

This past week we had to do a second blocking pass, or blocking plus, which means we had to come out from stepped mode into linear or spline mode, i went into spline mode all the way, the refining is fairly advanced, in fact i don't know what else to refine/change/add, so let's see what my mentor says about it, i still think it needs something, so i hope he comes up with some great ideas or corrections.

I really think this assignment has been the most structured and organized i've done so far, i put a lot of time into planning (video reference, visualization, thumbnailing, observation, etc.) and as i mentioned in the last post, the blocking lectures have been very useful, and it all paid off very well, so thanks AM! Next week is the final week for this assignment, and i have to start planning my next animation with a new character!!! finally! this one has spine, head and no arms. So here's the splined animation.

Blocking "Ballie", Video Reference and More...Class 2 - Week 2

Finally here it is, my first animation assignment for this term (this is a 4 week assignment, 2 more left). We have had two lectures in a row of blocking methods (and there are more coming), i feel those have helped me tremendously, i've cut off my blocking time a lot, with the little tips and tricks, and the previous experience of a few months i feel that i'm taming the beast, at least for this kind of animation. I'm starting to believe that i'm getting good at this stuff, at least from my own personal point of view, i look back and now i can see all the progress i've made, throughout this blocking i could see more clearly what i was doing and could apply the principles mindfully.

One thing i feel i'm having trouble with is exaggeration and squash and stretch. I wish i could make things a little more cartoony but it's a little difficult for me at this point, and i strongly believe that it is for anyone at this stage of learning, what i mean is, to break the rules you have to know them first, (or something like that my mentor said), i mean, if i want to achieve a more cartoony feel, i prefer to nail down the physics first by studying a lot of video reference, shorts, movies, life action etc. and when the time is right then let's break them, and of course this is a little more obvious to me when i remember now that we haven't received an in-depth class on exaggeration or squash and stretch. So to sum up, first things first.

Two misconceptions i wanted to clear up, two relatives and some friends made me write about this, one of them is the "does it take a long time?", the answer is yes, well structured, polished animation takes time, my father saw me shooting video reference the other day and after a few hours he asked "did you finish the animation" lol, and with my experience and knowledge no way (poor dad)! it takes along time because this is almost like 2D, drawing by drawing with some help from the computer. The other thing is the video reference, we tend to think at first that animation is an automatic thing that comes instantly with talent, i know i thought like that!, my brother saw me watching some footage and said "that's cheating" lol, and that's ok, i think everybody thinks like that at first, but the truth is that video reference is an amazing way of learning animation, i mean wow, what a great teacher is a piece of .mov file. And as Bobby Beck said, "after a while you won't need to rely that much on video reference because you'll know how things behave" <--or something like that, because animation comes from observation.

A New Term begins!, Class 2 - Week -1

The second term just started! and just like the last term, this is a more relaxed week, we had to shoot some video reference and make some planning sketches in order to make an animation with "ballie" (the character we used for the walks), we have a month to finish this animation, i foresee some "happy animating", and i can't wait to start blocking my stuff, i just have to wait for my mentor's approval in order to start. And speaking of mentors, the one i got for this term is Dave Vallone (imdb here, which btw is incomplete), a really nice happy guy with 25 years of experience, that of course means that he has a classical 2D animation background which is awesome. But i'm not going to get carried away with emotions because of his resume and a first impression, i'll tell you how it went when the term is over, i know why i say this ;), but i really feel a good vibe from Dave, he seems to really love teaching.

In my new classroom there are 3 classmates from my previous term, which is somehow comforting, since the rest of the class is made out of US and Canadian guys, oh and one australian guy, but in my mind there are just 2 foreigners in the class, one from India and me, that's like coming from outer space and landing in a human classroom lol!, i guess it's the normal transcultural barrier feeling that you get when you move to another country, which i'll have to get used to if i want to find a good job overseas. Btw, this feels a lot like the real world somehow, so i think this is a good practice, i'm sure everything will be fine.

Again, i'm really grateful to be here, this so far has been a great experience, i've learned a lot throughout these past months, and i´m not just talking about animation. So let's keep on rockin' \m/!!!