Thursday 30 June 2011

Week 12...

Week 12 already seems a long time ago! this could potentially be the most overdue blog post of the term yet its been one of the weeks in which I've had the most free time, how does that make sense?! Infact I have actually recently started Class 2 now but I'll do a separate post for that at the end of the week.

The truth is that during our break week I tried to stay away from the computer as much as possible. I think for most of us the week off was a godsend! It felt great to get a decent nights sleep and not have to stress over the weeks looming deadline, that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy doing the assignment though!

I spent most of the time just chilling out on the afternoons during break week, I managed to get away for the weekend and had a great time, anyone who has me as a friend on facebook might have seen that I slightly over indulged in Krispy Kreme doughtnuts! Its great that they have made it over the pond and into the UK! lets just hope they do as well as Subway have and if I'm lucky we might end up with one closer than a 2+ hour drive away! Its just a shame I didnt have the week off work aswell really.

The assignment for our final week in Class 1 was to compose all of our shots together into a progress reel and fill out an end of term survey. This seemed pretty straight forward to me and I was looking forward to having an easy week. The so called "easy" week soon turned on me and transformed into a bit of a grind as I left things late and at the last minute decided to polish up a few of my shots, especially my personality walk.

Before starting at AM I put alot of thought into whether or not to also hold down a full time job. Now after completing Class 1 whilst working 6 days a week doing 50+ hours I am totally happy with my decision. I would highly recommend it to anyone starting AM to approach it this way.

The main thing I found was that it helps with your overall focus and really forces you to get your time management in check as you know that when you get home from work you really need to crack on with your assignment. Sure it adds to the overall pressure a little bit but the positives far outweigh the negatives, think of the money for one. You would sometimes find that students who didn't have a job tended to procrastinate a whole lot more and alot of the time were found handing in their assignments at the very last minute. At the same time there would be a student who held down a full time job that would have theirs handed in the night before. Obviously this wasn't always the case but it was great to see.

Anyway, heres my Class 1 progress reel everyone! can't wait to start posting up some new content in class 2! - Adam

Monday 13 June 2011

Week 11...

What a week its been!

Were almost at the end of Term 1 and I cannot believe how fast it has gone, it seems like only yesterday I was surfing the campus and thinking to myself "wow, week 4... nearly half way through".

This weeks assignment was to take our personality walk from blocking to final and to sketch and pose Stu to show balance.

I started the week by getting my sketches done so it would leave me free the work the rest of the week in Maya and offer less of an opportunity to get sidetracked and end up taking a serious dose of procrastination.

I started by making the changes to my walk that my mentor suggested, this was a whole lot more time consuming than I thought as it involved adjusting the main body of Ballie which in turn screwed with the legs and feet. It wasn't much fun re-doing it all but I got there in the end, even though the end was 2am.

On my second night it was time to click the dreaded spline button which pretty much unleashed hell onto my screen, that night sucked and the whole nights work went down the pan along with a rather large chunk of my confidence.

The third night went alot better but it was Friday and the deadline was fast approaching, I started to feel the pressure as I had a whole load of work to do and I was surviving purely on Monster™ at this time.

Saturday came and by the time I had finished work I got a couple of hours done in Maya before the many late nights over the past few days caught up with me and I had no option but to sleep. I woke up pretty late, opened Maya and realised I was getting no where fast as it felt like I had no more animation left in me for the day. I took a quick playblast which I thought at the time wasn't too bad and decided to head into town for the night, which at the time also seemed like a good idea.

Sunday morning I was back on it, slightly fuzzy from the night before but I knew what I had to do to get it to an acceptable level. The only problem being that I only had a matter of hours to do it. I didnt quite realise what I was up against and as time went on more and more problems started to stand out.

To cut a long story short I ended up having to force myself to stop animating even though I wasn't finished because I only had 15 minutes to spare and still had my pose to do. I quickly knocked a pose out and my exact hand in time was 11:59:46 PST so thats 14 seconds before the deadline = 14 seconds before I would get a whole grade deducted from my assignment!!

Im not proud of this and I seriously dont recommend it to any of the upcoming AM students in the future but it comforts me knowing there were a whole bunch more who were in the same boat as me!

In short, that was my week, how was yours?...

Heres what I came up with, I know theres a whole load of things that need fixing on the walk and I am quite looking forward to sorting them out this week, Thanks everyone! - Adam





Sunday 5 June 2011

Week 10, This time it's personal...

Couldn't resist this weeks post title, I've held back on the puns lately and had to let one go, it is the first stage of our last assignment in Term 1 afterall!.

Anyway this weeks assignment was to block out a personality walk of our choice in 50 - 100 frames. We also had to sketch poses showing exhaustion and as always pose our favourite out in Maya with the Stu rig.

Carlos gave us a cool lecture that showed us the importance of studying reference footage and how to utilize it for the best results. He also went over a bunch of other awesome, invaluable stuff that I wont go into.

Again I persevered with the Wacom tablet for my sketches this week and quite enjoy using it now im getting the hang of it, I've also created a custom palette of brushes in Photoshop that has really helped speed up my workflow. My Wacoms just a little A6 size Volito2 version and I was wondering if its any easier to use a larger A4 size one?, I'm half tempted.

This week I got a taste of how it feels to be burnt out, I animated pretty much all Friday night straight after work until 2am, then all Saturday night after work until 1:30am and it didn't help I was just recovering from a mid week cold. It resulted in a hellatious headache this morning but it was worth it as I was pretty happy with what I had come up with.

It was also a pleasant surprise to wake up to a working internet connection this morning and not having to cope with the extra stress of finding somewhere to upload my assignment.

Heres what I came up with this week!, Thanks everyone - Adam


 





P.S. AM's student showcase gets unleashed on Wednesday! Im so excited. If my good AM friend Kevin Taylors work isn't on it I'll eat my hat! He is an awesome animator and has been a huge help to me since the day I contacted him when I was considering applying for AM.