…and it was a bit brutal! Well, not the session itself, that was great! Very excited about being in this class. Seems like we have some cool people! The Q&A always overruns since everyone has to introduce themselves. It’s just gone 4am and I really need bed. Think I might try going to bed and awaking up at 2:30am next time… just to test it out and compare!
So glad I only have a half day tomorrow today!
As I mentioned in my previous post, I worked ridiculously hard last term and whilst it produced results, I felt it had a fairly detrimental effect on other aspects of my life (”Weekends/sleep/free time? What are they again?”). In order to strike a decent balance between AM/work/not work I think I’m going to have to take it a little easier this term. That’s easier, not worse. No more EPIC dance routines, for example. I’m going to try and keep it simple, short and spend time polishing. Looking forward to it!
I’ve also got my first Q&A session with new mentor Bryan Engram at 2.30am tomorrow. It’s a pretty brutal time slot but I think I can manage! Trying to talk to me on a Friday might be a bit of a write-off for the next 3 months, who knows! It should be good regardless as Bryan is Animation Director at Reel FX Entertainment in Dallas. He is also responsible for this.
I think there is a lot I can learn this term! :D
As Class 3 looms ever closer (OK, so it has actually started already :P), I thought I should probably get round to showing a collated version of all the work I’ve done thus far. So allow me to present, my Progress Reel for Class 2 – Psychology of Body Mechanics:
My final assignment, the tap dance, is not as polished as it should be but I think I just need to leave it for a while. I won’t be picking anything quite as needlessly challenging in the future; it’s simply too difficult to achieve a good result in the time allowed when you’re also trying to hold down a full-time job. I worked out that at the height of my AM activity so far, I was doing around 30 hours of work a week on AM and combined with a full-time 40-ish hour week at work, it was all getting a bit much!
*sob* That’s it, after 2 terms and 6 months with the legend that is Mr. Shaun Freeman as my mentor, the magic simply could not last forever! He’s not teaching Class 3, therefore he’s not teaching me any more. It’s been emotional Shaun!
In all seriousness, I’ve learnt an absolute (metric) tonne of stuff over the past 6 months and a large part of that can be placed at Shaun’s feet and the great critiques and fun Q&A sessions he’s conducted during my first two classes at Animation Mentor. From the cries of “GO TEAM!”, to the overuse of his new favourite phrase (”pants”) and even upto this evening’s jovial exploits, it’s been a great journey (or at least a very big part of one) and a great pleasure to have Shaun impart his top quality knowledge to us newbies!
And with that, I bid you all a goodnight!
ps. If you pop back tomorrow, I should have my Class 2 Progress Reel posted for your enjoyment (or otherwise)!
Well, yet another week of crapping my pants trying to get my work finished. Next term I am absolutely not going to pick anything as complex as this again. If I try, please come over and beat me up. If I were not doing a full time job at the same time it’d be absolutely fine, but there really simply no time to properly polish and refine such a complex animation and be able to sleep now and again :)
So in theory, this is finished. I was genuinely concerned about the state it was in when I uploaded it to the website. It turns out that it was actually OK! I had a great critique from Shaun; he was generally very happy with it but since I had asked for some really specific pointers about how to make it better, he went through and gave me a few key frame numbers to go through and polish some more. So that’s what I’ll be doing with the remainder of this week – only have ’til Friday to get my revision in though!
I guess it really is difficult to step back from your work and look at it objectively. Something to bear in mind next time, anyway!