Class I, week 12

Today is the last day of class I. The time has passed so quickly! I learned a lot of new things and I feel so happy that I'm a part of Animation Mentor community :)

My first progress reel:

Animation Mentor Progress Reel Class 1 2016 from Weronika Roksz on Vimeo.

Unfortunately, I can't go to the second class now, but I want to come back in June. So  I have three months to practice everything what I've learned so far! I have a lot of ideas what I can animate and I will post my plan, maybe it will be useful for someone :) 

Class I, week 11

In this week I recorded a new video reference. I wanted to know how exactly looks walk with skips.


My final animation of Personality Walk:



This week's posing theme: Balance

Class I, week 10

It's time for the most interesting task in class 1 - Personality Walk! :)
We had to create a character with personality and mood - I chose a young happy girl. Then I recorded reference video:


And made planning:

With those references I animated first stage of this walk - blocking:



My mentor said that I can try to make "skip cycle" - it would be happier and snappier :) This version I'll show you in the next post.

This week's poses (theme: Exhaustion)

Class I, week 09

This week we polished our vanilla walk so this is my final animation:



And "concern" pose:

Class I, week 08

This week we started to study human walks. It's amazing that each person has his own unique way of walking!  And after analyzing someone's walk we can say if he is healthy or sick, young or old, happy or sad etc. But for now we had to learn how to animate "standard" vanilla walk.

In week 8 we had to make only blocking of our animation:


And for posing - this time the theme was "Strength":

Class I, week 06 and 07

This week assignment was very funny! Our task was to animate the ball with tail - Tailor. We had to use squash & stretch, anticipation, follow through and overlapping action. Enjoyable and challenging!

At the beginning it was difficult to understand the movement of  the tail, but our mentor said that it's similar to the ribbon dance. That helped me a lot!

We had two weeks for this animation - the first one we animated our "squirrels" (mostly with "straight ahead" method) and the second one we polished the splines in graph editor.
So this is my animation after all critiques:



PS Scrat is the best inspiration! :)

Class I, week 05

Hi! Today I'll show you my pendulum :D Honestly, it was very difficult task for me. I'm currently in week 7 and we animated the ball with tail (Tailor) but I think that pendulum was harder! I had to fix it a lot of times... It was our first animation of overlapping action - quite difficult topic.

My sketch:

and my animation after two critiques:



My biggest problem was the speed of the chain when the block slows down.  I hope now it looks good :)

And our second task was posing (I love it!).
Theme: devastation

Class I, week 04

Recently we had to make one bouncing ball. This week (wow it's one month already!) our task is to animate two bouncing balls, one light and one heavy.

My planning:

And my animation (after Scott's critique):

This week we were assigned to peer buddies. It's awesome idea because we get a lot of help from them, they are in the class 2-6 so we can ask them about animation and AM. The best thing is that I have TWO peer buddies (by mistake) and it's really cool :D

Class I, week 03

Hey!

"The third week" means that we finally begin to animate! It's "just" bouncing ball but this task is really important. It helps us understand what the timing and spacing are.
First part of our ball assignment - sketch:

And we also had to make an EXCITEMENT position sketches and then pose Stewart.

I wanted to do something more unique than just joyful jump with hands up :P  I found out that sportsmen are very inspiring! Their gestures are so expressing and clear. I wanted to choose excited footballer, but suddenly I reminded about... "Singing in the rain!". So one of my favorite movies was my inspiration :) I changed and exaggerated this pose a bit because I needed more cartoon style.

 Hooray! :)

Class I, week 02

Hi! I finally decided to start a blog about my progress in Animation Mentor. Now I'm in class I, week 04 but in this post I'll focus on my first assignment.

My mentor is Scott Lemmer, Dream Works animator. He worked on Home, Rio (I love those movies!), Peabody and Sherman, The Croods, Ice Age and many more. You can see his awesome Demo Reel here.

In my class there are nine students, most of them live in the USA. They are all nice, helpful and give good feedback :)

The CroodsT

Peabody and Sherman

Peabody and Sherman

Peabody and Sherman

Our first week was very easy because we didn't have to do any animation task. There was only setting up our campus profiles and introducing ourselves.

The second week we got our first task: "Sketch various poses from life and recreate one pose in Maya using Stewart".

Seemingly easy but it's quite difficult to sketch moving people in public place. Your drawings have to be fast and rough. No details, only lines of action and simple shapes.

I had two sessions of drawing in park. I found out that watching people is quite fascinating :) But I warn you, you have to do this discretely...

My sketches:

You have to be patient to see people who do something more than just staring at the phone :P

And my Stewart pose, first version: 

and improved version after my mentor's critique: 

 

 Well, that's all for now. Cheers!