Scream Real Loud

So, this week we took our two-person dialogue sequences and blocked in the main key poses to define the movement and performance that we'll be animating. This lays the groundwork for everything that is to come. I went a bit further than normal with the blocking in the first and last shots, because this week we'll be taking one shot out of blocking and starting actual animation, and I wanted to make sure I had a firm foundation to start with. So, here she is: (Remember, we block in "stepped" mode, so all you will see are the actual poses without any inbetween frames.)



I'm so glad that I went with this scene. Sure, it's complex as hell, but it's exactly what I need at this point in my education, to see exactly what I can do and how well I can do it. Plus, this scene is about 50% physicality and 50% performance. Prior to the first dialogue assignment, everything I had done was concentrated on the physicality of movement, and the first dialogue assignment was concentrated on performance. So now, I have a chance to combine both worlds into something wild and crazy. And we all know how great wild ajnd crazy is, right? How many astro-sign medalions can you wear? (Try five of them.)

Other than this, life is... well, it's life, I suppose. Saw a bunch of people I haven't seen in ages last night at a big shindig at Fox Valade's pad, which was fun. (Hell, just getting out of the house is a reason to celebrate.) And at work this week I had the supreme displeasure of running a whole slew of awful Steven Segal and Sylvester Stallone films, including Above The Law, Under Siege 2: Dark Territory, The Glimmer Man, Hard to Kill, plus Stallone's Assassins, and the ever-popular 'Taco Bell Version" of Demolition Man. (And yes, I kid you not, it's actually called the "Taco Bell" version.) Oi.

There are some cool and nifty things happening, though. I will be participating with several other animators from school in the "Project 21" contest, where you are given 21 days to write, produce, and shoot (or, in our case, animate) a short film.I'm not doing any pre-production work on it - just animating - which will be a nice change from the old "lets wear every hat" nightmares. And I've been accepted as a student volunteer at this year's SIGGRAPH conference in August (an international conference of animation and computer graphics, which I've been dreaming of attending for a decade) so I'll have all sorts of incredible opportunities to meet people and pass around my reel

So now, we scrape the fish off the grill and sleep for the next eight days.