Road Trippin', and the Kettle Stu's

So, as was stated in the previous Blog entry, last weekend myself and Writer/Quasi-Actor Fox Valade embarked on an epic 8-hour journey from the LA Den of Sin to the oft cold and foggy 'Frisco. A journey wrought with old-timey adventure and discovery. Among our discoveries: traffic in Santa Barbara is the epitome of evil, never stop to eat in Salinas, and never trust a San Francisco weatherman. But that's a discussion for another time.

The whole reason for the trip, the Animation Mentor BBQ, was, to use the vernacular, awesome. I met a ton of great people (all of them were nearly unbelievably nice), including many who were, like me, just entering Class1. I talked at length with a fellow student who was currently working at ILM, and got to meet two of the school's founders - Bobby Beck and Shawn Kelly (the third founder, Carlos Baena, was there too, but I wasn't able to wrangle him.) Following the BBQ, we embarked on the second goal of the weekend: See Ratatouille. We did - at an AMC made from what appeared to be an old bank in the center of San Francisco. Tickets were about $11 freakin' bucks, but it was worth every penny. The film is utterly amazing - perhaps Pixar's best work. See it. No - stop reading this and see it now. I don't care if its 2am. Drive to another time zone and see it as soon as they open.

Fishy Fishy Fishy Fish, Fishy Fishy Fishy Woo

Shortly after my last post in this blog, I had a breakthrough. After nearly ten years of attempts and failures, I finally figured out how to draw a fish in perspective. Ladies and Gent's, meet Alan:
(As always, click for a larger view.) Many of you are probably thinking: "So what? It's not that good anyway." But for me, this is huge. I know that the drawing has its problems, but actually being able to pull it off opens up a whole world for me. This means that I can finally start storyboarding Plastic Castles (a film I've been trying to make since 1998), assemble a story reel, and finally start animating. Hell, I might even be able to finish it for the tenth anniversary of the film's start of production. It also means that I might actually be able to pull off animation as a career. Just to be sure, I spent the next 14 hours seeing if I could duplicate it. What resulted?
That's the majority of the emotions that the character goes through in the film. (A big Thank You to Drew Pierce, who let me borrow his "How To Draw DC Comics Superheroes" book six years ago, which inspired many of these expressions.) I realize that the shading is inconsistent, but these are just tests - and I'm working on simplifying it further, without shading, for easier use in storyboarding and thumbnailing. This has also helped my human figure in perspective stuff, which is necessary for thumbnailing and planning shots for AM. Speaking of which:

Adventures in Television

This week also marked my first full week at AM. Tuesday night my class met our mentor - Sean McLaughlin from Dreamworks Animation (animator on Shrek 2 & Over the Hedge - also was the 3D lead for the Chariot Race in Prince of Egypt.) Though it was almost a disaster for me. In an effort to save a few bucks, I decided to use my old MiniDV camera as my webcam (all interaction with your mentor is done via webcam,) which worked great when I tested it. But, for some reason, every time he tried to choose my camera so we could talk face-to-face, my browser crashed. I eventually had to disconnect the Firewire cable and just use the camera mic for audio without video, which was a big disappointment for me. I had such cool plans for my webcam video - I was going to have my mom send my Video Toaster so I could incorporate multi-camera switching, chroma-key, and even occasional B-Roll footage into these webcam Q&A sessions. I may still be able to do the chroma key stuff with some tools I found online, but the loss of the cheesy Pouring Water and Kiki Stockhammer wipe transitions is almost too much to bear. ;-)

Meet Stu

Our first week in AM they gave us a character to play with - named Stu. The purpose of Stu is simply to work on basic posing of a character. I don't really have a lot of practice in this arena as yet, but hey, that's why I'm here.

This week I just played with Stu a bit to try out the controls in Maya and the see what I could pull off at this point. These poses were done from memory - I had no physical reference drawings or video to go by other than me in a mirror (which may seem really disturbing for the second pose,) so they aren't terribly good. But, nonetheless:
From TMNT (the only reason this one stuck in my mind is because I've run the film about 20 times at work.) This is, roughly, Raphael's stance before he fights his brother Leonardo. (Of course he's supposed to be holding swords, but I think fists work for demo purposes.) Personally, I think the pose could be more aggressive, but I'm not exactly sure how to do that yet.
From David Lynch's Blue Velvet. I don't know why this pose has stuck in my mind so long (I've only seen the film once.) This is supposed to be (roughly) Isabella Rossellini's "He Put His Thing In Me" pose. (For those who haven't seen the film, Kyle McLachlan takes a naked Isabella Rossellini to Laura Dern's house, where at one point she stands there, arms outstretched in ecstasy, and says "He put his thing in me." Really disturbing. And no, I was fully clothed when I mimicked this pose at home.) Again, I feel that this could be a sexier, and more disturbing (it looks more like a step from Singin' In The Rain to me), but again, I need a lot of practice with this.

Naturally, comments are always welcome and encouraged. Now I'm off to watch this week's lecture. I promise, from here on out, the posts will be shorter. But since I know most of you will never read the text this far, I leave thou brave ones with a ponderous question: If a chicken-and-a-half can lay an egg-and-a-half in a day-and-a-half, how long does it take a grasshopper to kick all the seeds out of a dill pickle?