Strike a Pose

Our first assignment at Animation Mentor was to pose Stu, the 3D Model. I did some sketches, checked out some people doing Yoga, and then began to drink heavily. This is what I came up with. I hope you enjoy it...and no this is not some Cirque Du Soleil sex act. Rock!

Grievous, Jar-Jar, The Emperor, and Yoda

Monday night there was a Q&A session with 3 animators from ILM that worked on Star Wars Episode III. They had worked on the scenes with General Grievous scurrying away on all six appendages, the fight between The Emperor and Yoda, general Jar-Jar goodness, and many more. It was awesome to hear them talk about the process they went through and how organized the production was. They had a million billion shots to do, but they were actually ahead of schedule. Awesome!

Someone asked the animators if they ever took the Jar-Jar model and performed violent, painful acts on it. They said no. I would probably create an animation where Jar-Jar was super smooth with the ladies. He would be out to dinner with a hot Gungan and he would try and woo her with his Robert Goulet like voice. Goulet!

Next week is our first animation assignment. I am super excited about that. I can't wait to get feedback from my mentor about my animation. I hope he has a lot of Pixar goodness to pass along to me. Bouyah! I will be adding my assignments to this Blog and I will be looking for feedback, so get ready!

This is a side note, but I got drunk on Saturday night and watched Transformers The Movie. Whoa! I never realized that Judd Nelson, Leonard Nimoy, and ORSON WELLES were voices in it. I could not imagine calling up Orson Welles and asking him if he wants to be the voice for Unicron, a planet size robot that eats other worlds. Freaky deaky!

Unicrock!

2D Animation is Beautiful

I watched two lectures tonight. One was on 2D animation and the other one was on Spacing. The 2D lecture was given by a Pixar animator. Woo hoo! She drew this mouse jumping roap and I thought I was going to put on my "O" face right there. It was so beautiful. The whole process of blocking out the key drawings and then breaking down the inbetweens was just amazing. The final animation was just so cool. I love the look of 2D animation. The medium itself just makes for a great looking image.

The spacing lecture was great too. It brought me back to my physics days and how these things that we are creating in the computer need to act like they are living and breathing in our world. So far 2 great lectures.

It is so hot, by Minneapolis standards. It was 97 degrees today. It might have been 98, but I don't want to get sued by Nick Lashay. I have the AC pumpin' in the bedroom, but unfortunately my computer is out in the dry, hot desert known as my living room. I hope we get some cold Canadian winds soon or I may have to start going to my Q&As naked.

Rock it man!

First Q&A

I just finished up my first ever Q&A with my mentor Stephen Gregory from Pixar. He is a really cool guy and he has a lot of animation experience. We were able to ask him questions about how he landed at Pixar and what kind of stuff should we expect this term. It was good times.

Man! It was weird talking to someone over a WebCam. I kept wanting to look at my monitor instead of looking into the camera. Maybe I should put a cutout of The Good Doctor's face on my WebCam and pretend like I am talking to her. Do you think my mentor would be weirded out if I gave my camera the tongue? Maybe I should leave Dr. Pistachio out of it.

I can't wait to start animating.

Rock the Casbah!

What Would You Animate?

So! I had my first Q&A experience at Animation Mentor last night. The Q&A session was hosted by the three guys that started Animation Mentor, so almost the whole school showed up. Man! There had to have been almost 400 people logged on at once. The video was super choppy, because of all the users, but I could still hear the audio. There were some really good questions asked, especially one about "What would you do if you could animate anything?".

The three guys said that they would like to try some kind of drama. One of them said that they would want to make the audience cry. That is very interesting, since a lot of animation is geared toward kids, if you don't count tentacle porn or Worker and Parasite :) What if more animation took on serious themes? What if Pixar did a drama?...action?

I would love to do a Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Three Stooges, or Abbott and Costello type animation. I think the character interactions and the gags would be awesome to animate. Plus, you would really have to nail down your character's personalities to make it work.

On a side note, I have my first Q&A with my mentor tomorrow. There I will actually hop on the WebCam and travel down the rabbit hole to see what I can see. Wish me luck internet world. I have a tendency to get nervous and start swearing uncontrollably. I better check my mic volume.

Rock to your mothers!

WebCam Etiquette

I am sitting here waiting for my first live Q&A WebCam session at Animation Mentor. The three guys who started it are leading the presentation.

I am kind of nervous. There are going to be around 600 people in this chat and at any time the leaders could call on me and bring up my WebCam feed. It is all very 1984 man. I can see it now. They bring up my feed and all of a sudden my mouth goes numb. I can't turn my head. The tension builds and builds until finally I explode updwards, ripping off my clothes and passing gas until finally my WebCam is clouded by shreds of clothes and noxious gases. It takes me back to junior high.

Whoa! I just noticed someone from europe in the chatroom. His clock reads 3:22 am. Wow! That is dedication. I usually start to halucinate around 1:00 am. You know? The kind of halucination, brought on by sleep deprevation, that has you seeing bugs crawling all over you and aardvarks nibbling at your legs. Crap that is late!

Well, the server clock says that I have 10 minutes to go until the presentation. I think I will get into some freaky yoga pose and try and calm myself down. Wish me luck people.

The true test will be Wednesday when I meet with my mentor. That is when I actually have to start wearing pants to the WebCam conferences.

Rock of ages!

What?!

What?! You have to actually post stuff to these blog things? That is crazy talk my friends. I don't know if I am ready for this. I am possibly the worst writer that has ever wroten :)

Well, there are 2 reasons why I started this blog. They haven't made it to the subtitle yet, but they are definitely the foundation of what I am trying to do here. The first reason is to report, to the world, about my Animation Mentor experience.

"What is Animation Mentor D-man", you ask? That is an excellence question.

Basically, Animation Mentor is an online animation school created by three animators from ILM and Pixar. You receive animation assignments and then you interact with a mentor, who is a professional animator, over a WebCam. I was assigned a Pixar animator who has worked there since Bug's Life. Wicked! So, each week I will complete some kind of animation exercise and then my mentor will "rip me a new one", breaking down all the self confidence I ever had and wished to have. Then the process will repeat the following week. I feel a Disney song coming on...The circle of life or something.

I will upload my weekly assignments and you, the world, can comment on my "progress"...(cough).

The second reason I started this blog is to defend myself against what my wife, Dr. Pistachio, says on her blog. I think the whole World Wide Web thinks that I never do the dishes or wipe after I poop. Well! I do...sometimes :)

Oh crap! My wife has put the Lord of the Dance song on my Itunes playlist. I must go and first dance to it, undulating my legs like no other, and then finally delete the song so that I never have to listen to that horror again.

Rock people!