New animation exercises

So another week and 2 more good animation exercises for the show reel. After we had a master class he made it aparntly that walk cycles are pretty boring even if its a quadruped or your new to animation. Its always beter to have the character walking to an object or in some way show how it can be used (unless its games in which case cycles are usualy fine).

So the first excersize was just to have the character pick up a coin. Sounds simple but we are getting into acting now, so the body mechanics are pretty apparent but it provides lots of differnt ways to make yours a little more personalisd if you can put emotion into the character. So how the character reacts when he see the coin, or after hes picked it up, Nervous? happy? sneaky? confident? regretfull? lots of differnt paths to be taken.

The next one is all about how characters act to each other. Its basically 2 people on a bench, they are the only guidlines, one person can already be sitting and another joins, or how ever you want it. Then show some kind of interaction and how the characters play off to each other. For instance a well dressed man reading the news paper gets joined by a young teenager listening to loud heavy metal. Or a young girl who has a crush on a guy, or visa versa. This one can be completly unique, after watching a few myself we wrote down plenty of diffent endings that could have happend to each of the stories, i expect mine to last about 8 seconds.

Looking forward to uploading my video soon and see what you guys think.

Animation Master class

So today my theory lecture was canceled and instead we had a master class in animation. Which i was more then happy about.

The master class was done by Benn Garnish, someone who had previously come to Hertfordshire uni quite a few years ago and has been working at framestore for a while now. Hes worked on various things such as harry potter, Chronicles of Narnia, and marmaduke, much like our VFX lecturer who i believe worked closely with him when they were at framestore.

The master class was great he told us about the mistake he made at uni and that he actually decided to change career paths from lighting TD to creature animator AFTER he finished at Hertfordshire Uni. He got his first few jobs being a very junior animator on the TV show prime evil. And went through shot by shot what he did and what he could have done better. Its great to see that hes always seeing how he can improve even when he is already in the industry for a long time.

He went through plenty of shots from different films just explaining how working in a studio goes. with dailies and how you communicate with other animators who are collaborating in one scene. Also how many animators were in the scene and what they worked on, and how much time he took to do a specific shot. Some of it was quite eye opening as he worked very heavily on one shot but you couldn't see much of the animation in the end anyway.

Im really happy to see we are getting more of these master classes this year and industry professionals in and looking forward to seeing who we have next as last year we had Framestore guys Crytek and Sony.