2010 Reel

It's been a good year. The first year at CCS was primarily the acquisition of foundation skills, which would equate to basic training in the military. Lots of running around and firing your gun without any real corpses to show for yourself. After the hoops have been jumped through, campus explored, software taste-tested and basic drawing skills driven deep into your skull they cut you loose creatively. This having been my second year, the real learning experience began.

There were a lot of artistic gray areas and I was anxious to fill. Early in the year I pushed heavily to improve my ability to generate interesting characters and environments (lucky for me I had the foresite to enroll in a class titled Characters and Environments). There was the exploration of new software or using familiar software in new ways like Photoshop, After Effects and Flash. I also received my first taste of the monstrosity that is Maya and it's 10,000 capabilities. I even got to play with stop motion and some basic experimental animation techniques. The main challenge was the balance of exercising all that important foundation knowledge (head goes here, ass goes there) while pushing the bar further with animation with a focus on interesting story telling. These pursuits coupled with the rigours of life in general made for some stressful moments but I have no complaints. I came through with a host of new skills, renewed confidence and the finest grades sanity can buy.

It's almost eery constantly having several major projects running at once to suddenly be hit with complete freedom. I think I have a mild understanding of what prisoners go through when they're released after years of incarceration. I look forward to enjoying the void and doing some major relaxing this summer but so far I'm predominately keeping to the comfort of enclosed spaces and Maya tutorials.

Colorful Characters

Interesting character design is an area I feel I've made significant strides in recently and am excited to continue experimenting with. As an animation student I'm almost exclusively working somewhere between rough sketch to finished line work. I do enjoy rendering and experimenting with color. It's surprising what even a little extra detail can do to take a piece from a rudimentary phase to feeling complete. Unfortunately that little extra detail translates to a lot of extra work in the realm of animation. Once this semesters done I'm hoping to scan some of my sketch book characters in and dress them up real nice with digital paint.

My First Successful Animation Test

I did this way back in Tech 1. I feel like this is still one of the most interesting animations I've done at school. It's just a sack so there's no secondary details to screw up that might be holding it back that are present in some subsequent tests. I tend to avoid designing simple characters. Either my ego or some neuroses leads me think of it as cheating on some level. Really, I've done myself a disservice not spending more time in class working slowly into the more complex characters. I think I'll have to put together some more short tests over the summer with an emphasis on experimenting with simple forms.

This was also the first test where each pose was sketched out in my sketchbook along with twice as many unused poses before I ever touched the light table.