Thursday, September 18, 2008

blah blah blah blah blah excuses

I have a blog! I am going to post on it.

I just finished Class 4 with my FANTASTIC mentor Brett Coderre of Pixar. I have never learned so much so easily at AM, and it was extra nice to have a mentor who is stylistically similar to me because I actually always agreed with his advice. Don't get me wrong though, style is where the similarities end! He can actually pull off the style he's going for, whereas my poor skill level is nowhere close to pulling it off :P

He even gave us mini-crits mid-week, and always went above and beyond during the Q&As. I'm really sad to leave this class because I can't imagine that I'll have it this good again, but I guess we'll see! Here's my latest assignment, which I'm sure will look like crap because blogspot isn't very good at this whole video thing.



Here's a link to a QT mov of the scene, in case the Blogger video sucks too much: CLICK

Time for sleep; I just wanted to post before I forgot. Goodnight!

Friday, January 18, 2008

Oh ya, Class 2 and Stuff

At this point I should probably just go ahead and change the title of my blog to something more appropriate, like "binzer doesn't blog her blog, but thanks for stopping by sucker."

It's not that I hate the 3 people who occasionally read this blog, or that I hate blogging, or that I hate animation. Mostly it's just that I'm lazy and that I've been spending too much free time playing Rock Band and watching Scrubs. I only discovered the show last year, and after a long period of despising it I recently starting loving it, which means that I have seven seasons to watch, and that's a lot. My dog also has big brown eyes that bore into my soul every time I'm on the computer, and a cute fuzzy tummy that forces me to give him raspberries when he's trying to sleep.

Oh, and ALSO, I got totally disenchanted with blogging because my videos are always butchered when I upload them. I can butcher the timing and quality of my work well enough on my own, and the extra help finishing the job just makes me ornery.

Is that enough excuses yet? If it's not, feel free to shoot me an e-mail because I have some extra excuses saved up that I'm happy to share.

ANYWAAAYS, Class 2 has started! The topic is Body Mechanics and I think it's probably the most terrifying class I'll take during my stay at AM. Everyone I talk to says it has the steepest learning curve, not to mention that a large number of people seem either to retake it or drop out, so it's gotta be hard. I hope I'm done Scrubs by the time it picks up :(

My mentor is Brian Mendenhall from Tippet, and I think he'll be a good mentor to have for this class since he's used to a very realistic style, which usually means accurate body mechanics! He seems very knowledgeable, and he's also quite the chatterbox which should make for some awesomely informative Q&As. Too bad I'm an IDIOT and missed this week's Q&A because I forgot that it's on a different day for me this term :( Luckily for me my wonderful classmate Maya gave me some kickass notes, but I'll have to get my head screwed on straight before next week.

It's 2AM and the supply of guilt that was fueling me to write this has officially run out, so that's all for now! I may start hosting my videos so they don't suck so much, but I'm happy to take alternate suggestions (I already tried wordpress, and something about it didn't work for me, but I forget what :P).

PS Check this out if you have time: http://mattsevensix.blogspot.com/

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

sooo frustrating

Apparently blogger butchers the timing of your video, so here's a youtube version. It still sucks, and it stops part way through (just progress the slider a frame forward to get it moving) but it's better than nothing!

I fail at blogging.

Yikes, I can't believe I haven't posted since Halloween! Actually, I guess I can believe it since I lasted longer than I thought I would in the first place. Anyways, I feel reeeeeallly bad since I know there are poor people out there with no access to the AM site, and I can empathize with how much that sucks.

I was just looking through the old videos I posted on this blog and I was horrified to see how terrible they look with a fresh eye. I guess I'll still post what I've been working on lately, but I'm pretty worried that it's all more horrible than I've realized.

Class is almost over btw! This week is the last real week, and then next week is an easy week of compiling all our assignments (although I suspect that in my case it will be a long and frustrating week since I still have a lot of revising I want to do). I'm kinda sad about the end of class since I have awesome classmates and an awesome mentor and it's sad to see them go (although I realize they're not dropping off the planet or anything).

On the bright side, I'm really excited to start class 2! Excited and terrified, since I hear that's when things really start getting tough. I think I can hack it, but I guess we'll see!

Anyways, I have way too much to do and only even wrote this because my guilt was weighing me down, but I'll try to post again before Christmas :P

PS This weeks assignment is a character walk, and I'm doing a wounded guy. I bit off waaay more than I can chew, so I'm expecting a week filled with bouts of indigestion :(






Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Happy Halloween everyone!

I'm lame and am not doing anything special tonight (besides my Q&A) but I did dress up Enzo for a couple minutes! I don't think he likes halloween very much...

Monday, October 29, 2007

Another week gone by

Well, another great week is behind me, and the good news is that my video uploaded properly! My mentor Elliot couldn't have possibly been any more helpful throughout the week; he really goes above and beyond what's expected!

This week we get a ball with squash and stretch, so I'm actually pretty excited about that since I think it'll add a lot of character. I still have to think up a good idea though :S We also have to do a pose with Stu that shows devastation, and THAT I have a good idea for :D

In other news, I finally watched Surf's Up, which was actually a lot better than I expected! I didn't realize it was documentary style, but it works really well, especially since for the voices they actually had the actors stand in a room together and improv based on a pretty loose script. The whole thing ended up really natural and appealing, and quite funny, although it doesn't really come off as a kid's movie imo.

I also just started playing the new Ratchet and Clank game for PS3, which is also very good! Although the animation isn't exactly movie quality, it's a lot better than most other games, and I would certainly be more than happy to work on something like that. You can tell that they actually put a lot of work into getting good-quality results, whereas a lot of game companies have their animators working so quickly that the end product is pretty lackluster.

Anyways, that's it for now, check back next week, same bat-time, same bat-channel!


Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Only 17 more months to go!

It's officially the start of week 4, which means I've been at AM for almost a month now! I guess a month isn't actually very long, but it feels satisfying anyways.

Last week was our first animation week, which would've been really fun, but instead it was mostly just frustrating b/c my computer decided to crap out and develop a stutter (if you use your imagination I'm sure you can see how that would make animation difficult). I'm hoping to have it fixed this week, although I'm sort of dreading the fix itself.

I'm getting a new motherboard and processor and I know my computer is gonna be awesome, but at the same time, getting a new computer always sucks. It's kinda like getting a new house. It's technically better, and it's great once you're moved in, but there's always a really unpleasant period where you have to reorganize, throw stuff out, wander around looking for stuff you've lost, and generally just get annoyed because you don't have everything available that you're used to. I also find that I never realize how much useful stuff I had until it's gone, and that moving takes waaaay longer than I expect.

Anyways, as a result of my stupid broken computer my work wasn't as complete as I would've liked, but I'll post it anyways. This isn't actually the finished version of some of the stuff, but I can't stand to compile another video :P

This week my assignment is to animate a heavy ball and a light ball, so if you just HAPPEN to have some reference footage of a bowling ball or a ping pong ball bouncing, let me know!

EDIT: This was supposed to be posted Monday, but I got an upload error and then we took my computer apart to fix it. Oops! But now my computer is fixed with a brand spanking new Quad Core processor. Yaaaaaaaay :D

EDIT2: Apparently the video refuses to upload properly, so sorry, no video for you!