Here is my latest test shot called “Eat”. It has been a long time since my last personal test. I highly recommend it. I think it’s a great opportunity for growth and experimentation. I try to approach each shot with a goal in mind. My goal might be to improve on a principle of animation like timing. For this shot, my goal was entertainment value. Hopefully you watch it and laugh (I’ll even take a smile).
My favorite lecture while attending AnimationMentor has to be Doug Sweetland’s talk on “Entertainment”. He didn’t sit and animate (not that I didn’t love those lectures too!), he spent the majority of the time just talking about how important it is to make your work entertaining. I can’t sit here and type out all my notes, but watching that lecture literally changed my entire perspective on animating. My new approach is to focus on entertainment and then work to make sure everything else supports it. With each new shot, I hope you can see improvement in my work. This is a never ending journey to get good at this craft. Hope you enjoy and forgive the bad lighting/rendering!
Sorry for the lack of posting! Especially following my last posting proclaiming that I would try to post more often. Things have been hectic. I have been hard at work trying to work on my portfolio. I am pushing hard to get a staff job in feature film.
That being said, I just finished animating a new test shot and I wanted to share some of the process. I was looking for an audio clip with some punch to it. My wife and I are secretly obsessed with the movie “Just Friends” (yes, you read that correctly). Every time the movie is on TV, we are glued and laughing away. I ended up buying the DVD and looking for a clip I found entertaining. I then started to just listen. Over and over.
I can’t stress the importance of planning. It was something that I learned at AnimationMentor. It was stressed so much and the more I animate, the more I understand why they pushed the idea so much. I don’t recommend doing your first animatic in 3D. It’s too time consuming to see if it’s going to work. Grab a pencil and paper (or in my case a Cintiq and Sketchbook Pro), and just thumbnail it out. Nothing special. Draw stick figures! You just want to make sure the idea has potential before investing tons of time posing out characters and dealing with cameras, etc. And without further adieu…my poorly drawn animatic:
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