A short text post

Hey! I haven’t posted in a week so I’m just gonna put out some words.

As usual, I’m just chugging along to the best of my ability. Right now I’m working solely on the shots that I plan on putting in my reel that I’ll use to apply to animation jobs after I graduate, so that’s… stressful. To say the least. haha. Those shots in question, by the way, are:

– Pretty much the entire scene when the hero is at school for the first time. It has a lot of great acting, dialogue, as well as a great shot of the Mean Girl kicking the ball which demonstrates good physicality

– The shot where the hero climbs over the wall, because as far as physicality goes, that’s pretty damned difficult to animate

– The shot where the hero gets thrown into the monster mansion, which I revamped actually, and made it better for a reel; instead of getting thrown into the house and then getting up, he instead does a double-take, gets up, runs back towards the door he flew through, bangs on it a couple times, pushes against it with his whole body weight, and then gives up and turns around. Bam! Animation.

Aaaand that’s actually pretty much it. The funny thing with an animation reel, is that really all you need to show is that you can animate body mechanics well, and that you can animate acting/dialogue scenes well. And as an added bonus, if you can animate both of those things in more than one animation style, then that’s even better. Right now, the animation style I’m going for is a more realistic, less-cartoony motion, so I may go and do some extra stuff to kick it up a notch, but we’ll see.

I also updated my animatic with a new version of Scene 23 (aka the scene when the hero is in bed contemplating after he runs away from the monster mansion) and I think it’s finally working this time around. Woohoo!

So yea. It’s weird to think that school has only been in session for 2 weeks, because it feels like it’s already been at least a month. I feel like I’m going to die of old age before this semester ends, haha. And I don’t wanna get too emotional, but the fact that my performance on these specific shots of my film will eventually determine what kinds of jobs I get once I’m out of college…. it’s something that haunts my mind every day, and I sort of wish I could fast-forward through all of this stress. But alas, this is life, and this too shall pass.

Sorry there aren’t any images in this post! I try to keep it visual but this time around I’m just sort of slowly losing my mind and don’t wanna have to spend the time racking up screencaps and stuff.

Well, OK fine, here’s ONE screencap I made:

This is a shot of the re-done roughing-out of the shot of the Hero climbing over the wall, and I noticed that this one particular pose he made was very… pin-up. So yea. Clearly I am losing it.

Anyway, that’s all for now! More to come. Especially very soon, since I have a new animatic that I’m not showing you right now for some reason, haha.

 

OH, AND SIDE-NOTE! I noticed that my computer was filling up to dangerous levels of information, so I decided to clear some shit out, and I deleted all the playblasts from Maya that I had made. And you know how much data that ended up getting rid of? Over 14 Gigabytes. I had created over 14 gigabytes of playblasts in the last few weeks. If that’s not proof that that I’ve been working hard, then I don’t know what is!

 

OK, that’s really all for now. More to come!