This sensation is actually pretty typical. In at least the past two classes I’ve had “dips” during the middle few weeks of the term where I’ve felt bad about either about my work or my effort levels. It’s something I’ve always broken out of so I don’t expect it to last long, I just needed to tell someone :)

I’ll try and get my recent work and critiques posted first thing tomorrow!

First up, we’ve got the phonetic break-down of the dialogue:

Or rather, the dialogue written according what what mouth shapes are needed to make the sound. For example, you tend not to write things like ‘W’ (as in “what’s the big idea?”) – you actually make the same mouth shape when saying ‘w’ as you do if you said ‘ooo’. It adds an additional layer of complexity/thinking than just writing out the line using phonetics.

I’ve highlighted the most important sounds, these are the ones that I have to hit if I want the dialogue to read clearly, and also made a note of where I think there will be a pretty significant change in mouth shape over a very short amount of time (anywhere there’s a diphthong, for example).

Now it’s time for some terrible drawings!

Amazing, right? I can only apologise! It’s just a basic idea of what expressions I wanted to use over the course of the line. As long as it conveys the emotion, it doesn’t really matter how good (or in this case, bad) the drawings are. As you’ll see, I’ve actually already deviated from this slightly in my blocking phase.

Mario suggested this quick way of nailing down some basic jaw rotations – take the dialogue line and think about how open the mouth will need to be at various points and sounds.

Man, that new Animation Mentor logo thing is really annoying! Anyway, here’s my first pass of the facial animation for this shot – I’ve just tried to block in the main phoneme shapes and expressions. I know the body still requires loads of work – I haven’t touched any of that since last term, mostly because I moved house yet again this week, so I wanted to dedicated the limited time I had to just concentrating on the face. I’ve also included a ‘head cam’ shot so you can take a look at the facial animation without everything else to distract ;)

The curves for the facial animation are all clamped; I haven’t done any refining of those nor have I done anything with the tongue, cheeks or nose yet as I wanted to make sure the basic sound shapes are reading properly first. There’s also almost no eye animation at the moment (I think it works reasonably well already?) and there’s some basic blinking going on.

Thanks for reading! As always questions, comments or critiques are more than welcome!

The Choice

I say “this week” but this is something that I’ve been thinking about for quite a while now. I feel like I didn’t get enough out my last term at AM due to a number of factors, not least because things at work have been ramping up and because AM Term 4 covered stuff that I hadn’t really done before. I was really happy with my pantomime piece but I was really disappointed with my dialogue shot; it just didn’t turn out as I’d hope. Juggling 20-30 hours of animation studies on top of a 40 hour working week for 12 months really took it’s toll on me, hence why I opted to take a Leave of Absence at Christmas and recharge my batteries for 3 months.

But soon enough, there was the invoice for AM Term 5 sitting in my inbox and I had a choice to make: try and juggle my normal working week with the most difficult term at AM (multi-character dialogue shot) or take a risk; do the course full time, treat it like a full time job and really nail it. Although I’ve spent weeks stressing about my decision, at the end of the day I think I probably knew all along that this was definitely the right decision.

The Plan

Naturally, there’s no way I could afford the tuition fees for the course alongside rent in Cambridge and living costs whilst not taking an income, so I will be moving back to my parents’ place in Enfield for the duration of the term. It is incredibly comforting to know that my parents are willing and able to help me achieve my dream and I am eternally grateful for the contribution they have made/are making to my career.

At this point, the plan is basically throw my all into this term and really make the most of it. I’m intending to treat it like a full time job and do a full time job’s worth of work each day. This should allow me to continue to have a “life” and it will be much better for my health! At the same time, I will be putting together a new show reel (currently in production) and I will be applying for jobs in the hope of securing employment by the time I finish Term 5 at the end of June.

The Risk

The risks should be fairly obvious. There is no back-up plan; if I can’t get a job when I finish AM, that would be… awkward. At the same time, I’ve been in full employment at Sony now for over 3 and a half years and I’ll have been studying Animation Mentor for 18 months by the time I’m done. I feel like I’ve got enough experience, released titles and passion to go anywhere I want. I ought to be very employable. I certainly hope somebody out there thinks so.

The Move

So what of Sony? Well I’ve had an awesome time over the past 3 and a half years, worked on some major titles with loads of amazing, passionate and creative people. I will be desperately sad to leave Cambridge and all the good friends I’ve made since I’ve been here. The massive support, camaraderie and fun I’ve had at the studio can’t be underplayed and I can only hope that wherever I end up will half as good as my time at Cambridge.

And I guess that’s about all I have to say for now. If anyone is looking for passionate, experienced character animators to start work in early July, let me know.

Thanks for reading!

I’ve also reposted and backdated all the posts that I lost when the site got hacked (that’ll teach me to leave huge gaping security holes and not back-up regularly!) so everything should be up to date now. Unfortunately some of the posts are perhaps not as visually appealing as they could be (a whole load of pictures/video and a few lines of text can look at little busy at the best of times) but yesterday evening I really enjoyed spending some time writing about last week’s work and I definitely want to try and set aside some time each week to do it properly. I really feel the need to write about what games I’m playing at the moment as well… Who knows, some of you might even find it interesting!

My mentor for this term is Michelle Meeker. Although her IMDB page is looking a little sparse, she’s actually credited on a whole load of things including; “Antz”, “A Bug’s Life”, “Shrek” and two of the Lord of the Rings movies!

So it promises to a wild ride! Let’s hope I don’t drown!

As I said, it’s been a great class and seems to be a welcome addition to the AM syllabus. Although I don’t feel like I’ve actually learned anything “new” as such (I think the lectures are still in need of reshuffling/revamping), this term has been awesome for really solidifying the concepts of body mechanics from Class 2 and indeed the fundamental principles we learned Class 1.

What’s more, Bryan has been a superb mentor to me this term. I was in a bit of a weird place after Class 2 (I think it was that tap dance that nearly finished me off!) and it carried over into Class 3 as well. I was under a lot of pressure from various quarters and things were pretty bleak for a while. Thankfully I had Bryan to pick me up each week during the Q&As and the critiques.

It’s definitely the most open I’ve been during Q&As; it’s quite weird when you’re venting in front of people you barely know, but it was incredibly cathartic and I felt a lot better for it. Just as well Bryan is a pro at keeping you motivated! At no point did he ever tell me to just “man up” or anything like that. Always understanding, always encouraging. It was just what I needed so thanks a lot Bryan, you’re awesome!

Bring on Acting in Class 4 (right after I’ve had my week off! :P)!

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!

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!

SO THANK YOU SHAUN!

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)!

Anyway, about the class – this should be a pretty exciting one! We’re finally moving on to some more complex body mechanics exercises, looking at movement, weight, balance etc. whilst solidifying all the foundation principles we were taught last term.

From the curriculum page on the AM website:

Body mechanics is the place where most animators “go wrong.” If an animation does not have convincing mechanics, it does not look right even to the average untrained eye. For this reason, we spend two quarters on this important concept as once body mechanics is mastered, students have the confidence they need to tackle almost any situation their character gets into.

Students will focus on exercises with a simple character, which allows them to focus exclusively on the core concepts of body mechanics thus creating physical movements that are believable. Focusing on a simple character for these concepts will allow our students to make mistakes quicker and recover from them much faster. This allows them to soak up the concepts where they will be able to apply them more confidently next quarter to more complex characters.

Sounds exciting, right? Yeah! I know! Once again for this class, I’ve got Shaun Freeman as my mentor. This is great news as Shaun was a big, big help last term and I’m really looking forward to working with him again. The Q&As are fun and interesting and he’s always got great tips and advice in his eCritiques! Also, the Q&A times are ideal as I don’t have to get up at 4am to chat to people all over the world :)

LET’S DO THIS THING!