Found an awesome blog full of line drawings/animations!

Today I came across an awesome blog! www.livlily.blogspot.com

The Living Lines Library is a blog made by a guy who is an animator and collected line drawings and animations. The are amazing pieces of work in it and are really inspiring. I strongly recommend checking it out.

Brilliant Reference Video of a Kitten

After a busy week helping with the university motorcycle club at this years Freshers' Fayre, I am spending the day looking at reference footage and drawing some pose sketches and as my most recent posts have been about cats, I have been drawing cats. While I was searching for reference footage I came across this brilliant video of a kitten that is filmed in slow-motion. I'm loving slow-motion videos at the moment. Its so much easier to see every little detail of how an animal moves, from pose to how the muscles move and tighten. Fascinating stuff!

Moving Picture Company - Cat's Pride

People who know me will know that I love cats and that I am a fan of the Moving Picture Companies work so when I saw they had made TV spots for Cat's Pride cat litter with animated cats in I was happy and impressed. It is done wonderfully and is the type of thing I would of loved to of worked on. They even used 2 real cats to ensure the right actions and reference; and they were trained for 4 weeks to make sure they got the right actions. They went with the concept of both ‘Pass Out’ and ‘Massage’ and it means the cats are anthropomorphic and perform amusing actions. They didn't go with drastic anthropomorphism and I think it's done wonderfully with just the right amount of humanism. I hope MPC bring out a 'how they did it' video/podcast like they have with some of their advertising and movie work, its fascinating.


To view the article by Moving Picture Company and the 2 tv shots they made please CLICK HERE.

My new Showreel

As I have finished Maya Springboard I decided to update my showreel with the stuff I did on the course and also change some of the old stuff I had on it to show my process of animating in 2D. I think its loads better and what I've learned with Animation Mentor has improved my reel loads! I am so happy that I decided to do Animation Mentor and take the Maya Springboard course, I'd recommend it to anyone. It's good even for learning your way around Animation Mentor and how to do things right.

Got my Certificate for Maya Springboard

Sadly, we didn't get a last Q&A so I never found out what Said thought of my 1 leg animation but I did get a new news item which was a link to my certificate and here it is!

I'm sad that Springboard has finished and that I won't have any more lessons with Said but I am excited about going onto Class 1. Only thing is... I've not heard from my loan company yet and I'm worried that I won't get it before class starts and will have to wait another 3 months! That feels like a lifetime to me! I have been trying to look at the plus side though, for instance, if I go into the next term I will graduate when it is the AM barbecue so I could go to that and graduation. It will also give me 3 months to practice and do more pose drawings.

Wow 2000 views!

Wow, I just looked at this blogs stats and it just hit 2000 views! I hope that means your all enjoying it and finding it helpful. Please leave feedback by leaving comments below posts and let me know what you think about my blog, my work, advice.etc. I would really appreciate it and I'm sure other people who view the blog would find any comments helpful too.

Any way, thank you to everyone who reads my blog :D

My 1 Leg assignment

Well, Here is what I came up with. It still needs a bit of tweaking and I think the is something wrong with the rig as when I rotate the body to a certain point it randomly moves the knee out to a strange angle so if you look closely while he is flipping up side down you will see this. I've tried playing with it but still can't work out how to make it stop it so hopefully we will have a Q&A or 2 this week so I can ask Said what's happening.

I'm really sad that Springboard has now finished. Said wasn't sure if we got Q&As this week but I'm keeping my fingers crossed. I've just enjoyed it so much and learned a great deal. Said is really helpful and always goes over the hour and gives us a bit extra. I'm hoping that my future Mentors will be the same but I will miss his Q&As.

Q&A With Dhar Jabouri and Meet the Staff Q&A

I couldn't sleep so I decided to stay up and go to the Q&A's that were on in the early hours of Friday morning. The first was Meet the Staff! where we heard about the experiences and the job of this weeks guest. It was a bit interesting with the odd bit of advice and seeing how she got to where she is now.

1 hour later a Q&A with Dhar started and I really enjoyed this one. Dhar was really helpful and gave me lots of advice. We talked about AM doing a Short Story course and I told him how I find it difficult so he recommended I read Story by Robert McKee. Charlie was also there and he said I should read both of Nancy Beiman's books, which Dhar also agreed with. One is about storyboarding and the other is about making characters feel alive. http://www.amazon.com/Prepare-Creating-Characters-Animated-Features/dp/0240808207

We then went on about how I want to be a Creature Animator and Charlie asked if I had seen Deitrich Magnus' tiger animation, who is an Animals and Creatures AM student. His reel is below and it is really good!

Another bit of advice that Dhar gave was to not try and skip ahead and want to work on the final characters. Concentrate on where you are now and don't compare yourself to other people in your class. Talk to your classmates and ask if you don't understand, keep asking until you get it and ask more than one person.

Film Review of How to Train your Dragon in Q&A

At the end of this weeks second Q&A, Said went on to do a film review of 'How to Train your Dragon' but not like a normal review, this was a frame-by-frame look at parts of the movie to show arcs and not using symmetry, anticipation and staging.

Some of the comments Said made: -

• Hiccup would move his eyes and then his head would follow to look at Toothless.


• 'Keep it simple, keep it stupid'. What he means by this is to keep backgrounds unbusy so the characters are the main focus.
  


• Characters move in nice arcs. Whether its their arms, tail or head. A good example of this was near the beginning where Gobber is having a drink and he slams it down and turns. Or how Toothless moves and swishes his tail.
  


• Don't keep things symmetrical unless your looking for seriousness. Like when Toothless is staring at Hiccup in a serious manner to make him eat the fish but when he bites into it, Toothless relaxes and sits back and his pose is not symmetrical at all. Like one ear was higher than the other and even his eyes were different sizes!


• Said also explained how Hiccups father, Stoick is all powerful, big and manly so when he was sat in the dark in his house in front of the fire and Hiccup tries to sneak in he was filling most of the screen (the animator had also nicely posed him in an arc but still not symmetrical). Hiccup is small and weak so when he comes in he is small in the background to represent him. It's easier to explain when you see it, sorry I should of taken more screen shots.

I love How to Train your Dragon and it is one of my favourite movies! If you love it too or even just love dragons or concept art then I recommend this book. The Art of How to Train Your Dragon (How to Train Your Dragon Film)

Week 10 - Make '1 Leg' jump!

Now this week's assignment is our last and one I've been looking forward to for a while so sad but happy too.

This week we have to make a character jump but he only has one leg, a ball for a body and no head or arms, you can see what it looks like below. I didn't want to make him just jump so I decided to make him do a backflip. Below is the storyboard I made as my plan for how it will look and an animatic to show you the timing :)

Wacom Inkling

Came across this today and wow! I have been hoping for ages something like this would come out but Wacom took it further than I had thought. Like the button so your sketches and designs can be on separate layers! Pure genius!

This new Wacom system combines a digital sketch pen (it makes like a pen or pencil) with a clip-on receiver, which digitally records each stroke of the pen. Your drawings can then be rasterized or vectorised, uploaded to your computer and imported to either Photoshop or Illustrator or saved as an image file!

Basically this is how it works:

• You take the stylus and receiver out of the cool little box.
• Clip the receiver on the top of any paper, notebook.etc and start drawing. According to Wacom the receiver can store thousands of pages so very handy.
• Press the button on the receiver to create new layers.
• When you are done, connect the receiver to a computer via USB and you can see all your drawings. Export the one you want to use to Photoshop or Illustrator or any typical graphic format. ie. TIFF, JPG, BMP.

The Inkling will cost around £125 +VAT and comes with a pen, receiver, rechargeable batteries, four spare pen ink cartridges, charging case and the Inkling Sketch Manager Application, which is neatly stored in the Inkling receiver. It will be available from October 2011. When it does get released I will post a link on here for where you can buy it.