Class 1 Basic Foundations

Saturday at 5am was the official end of class 1 at Animation Mentor. What can I say, it was sooooo freak'n awesome. My mentor was Anthony Wong - who studied at CalArts, worked at Disney, worked in games, and is now working for Pixar! He was totally inspiring as he came across as a passionate artists who animated and draws because he loves it so much. He was also very knowledgeable, realistic about how the industry is, and just a great mentor overall.

The curriculum was great as each week built upon the next - gradually increasing our confidence with the animation foundations, sketching poses, and posing 3D characters. I feel ready to move onto class 2 and 3 - body mechanics: what I've been told is the hardest part of animating. Here is my progress reel from the class 1. I'm still revising a few things and may update it. We only have one week of break though, so I may not get around to everything - especially 'cos I gotta catch up with the world and all. They say it's best just to make lots of work - learning from your mistakes as you go, rather than spending ages on a shot or pose anyways.

I'd have to agree that one of the best things about AM is the community. You have your class mates and peers from other classes who you are able to give feedback to, get feedback from, and get inspired by. It's a great way to network and create friendships with people we're likely to work with one day. And one of the really cool things is that once you've joined AM, you never leave. You get continued access to the community as an alumni, as well as other things like job opportunities and refresher classes.

I was quite surprised that we pretty much had a live Q&A available to us most days if we wanted it. And the lectures and eCritiques are uber awesome.

All in all, after class 1, I feel more confident about approaching animation, know what areas are my strengths and weaknesses, and just feel really inspired to learn and practice more posing and animating. Yay for AM! It's by no means easy, but it's really encouraging and fun learning together with a community of like-minded people - all with the same goal.

Note: next post is likely to come at the end of next term.

Ball with Roll Exercise

I found out who my class 1 mentor will be and I'm totally stoked. It will be Anthony Wong - an animator from Pixar, who also has Disney on his resume. Class 1 starts tomorrow. Let the real animation education begin!

In the interim, I thought I should try to learn a bit about bouncing balls. My focus here was supposedly the roll, as I avoided adding rolls in my MSW exercises. This exercise has not had any feedback, so I'm sure it's full of flaws. Please do bring any weaknesses to my attention if you notice them.

I have so many questions to ask and am so pumped for the core part of AM. Here's the beginning of the point of no return, and I'm diving in head first.

Maya Springboard Progress Reel

It's now week 11 of my first term ever at Animation Mentor. Actual classes and assignments have finished, and I've compiled all my exercises done during this time (including some non-assignments) into this one video progress reel. The focus of the Maya Springboard class was becoming comfortable with the technology, so there was no mentoring of the 'art' itself. However, we were able to give each other comments, and this feedback helped immensely. From here onwards, things can only get better (sounds like a song I know....)



FYI to any non Animation Mentor folk looking at this, AM terms are pretty busy and we generally post our work internally within the AM site. Consequently, during my time at AM I may only update this blog at the end of each term.

First animation

This week we began learning the technical stuff in Maya relevant to animation. Our first task was to animate a poly sphere. This is what I came up with - trying to implement some concepts from the Jason Ryan ball tutorial. However, when I looked at other people's work, I learnt a few new tricks which I will surely apply to my next animation and which will fix any floatyness that this ball may have.

Weeks 4-6 at AM

Weeks 4 to 6 of AM was essentially teaching us the basics of the non-animation discplines of modeling, rigging, surfacing and lighting, whilst simultaneously getting us familiar with tools and concepts such as hierarchies and cameras which will help in our animations. We had to build a simple character and simple set, put is some camera shots, wack in some surfaces and lights, and render those shots. I feel that the main relevance that comes out of this exercise for AM is that we'll be confidently able to set up our shots for AM exercises. Of course a lot of this was just revision for me, but I still learnt heaps, and after barely touching Maya for a year (though I did use Lightwave for work), I felt re-energised and excited about doing creative stuff in 3D.

I know that some of the shots are a bit dark, but seeing as I am trying to be an animator, I won't go back to fix that now, but rather put my energy into learning animation stuff.









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Some sketches

Unfortately I can't afford to do 1 evening a week life drawing classes at the moment, but as an alternative I've been sketching from photographs that I find on the net. I just think of a topic (sports are my fav at present) and look up images for that. As it's now the winter olympics, I chose snowboarding and ice skating for today. Oh yeah, I also managed to get some Col-erase pencils via ebay (Amazon was lame and didn't want to ship such things to Australia), so I've been using those to draw.

I think my drawings aren't anything special yet, but I am aiming to get more confident at capturing gestures. I think once I read and do the exercises in the Wayne Gilbert book, I'll be a lot better.

Posting of some of my 2009 work

The truth is that when it comes to artistic things I tend to just do it and think it's a waste of time to upload it online. Especially when it's hard copy stuff and I have to put the extra effort in to digitize it all. But I've been listening to and reading a lot of resources that basically say that it's bad to try to develop your artistic skills in isolation. It is far better and more productive to let people critique what you do, and improve from that. So in light of that, I will actively make an effort to post some of the sketches and animation exercises I do here on this blog.

So to start off, I'll be posting some of the things I did last year (2009) and early this year (2010). Then after that, I will post shortly after creating something share-worthy.

For now, here are some of the Christmas card caricatures I drew last year for some of my family members:

My brother, Christian, being tossed about by the wind.

My nephew, Dylan, as the wild boys that he is.

My nephew Jesse - as the sweet little nerd that he is :)

My brother-in-law, Rado, as the business entrepreneur.

My sister, Silvia, as the problem-solving warrior

More to come next time.

Feedback on whether my website has been hacked

Hi guys,

I don't want to give a second thought to my old websites now that I'm embarking on animation mentor road, but I got a wierd email and got a message before mentioning errors with my website: www.nicolettekiss.com that suggested it's been hacked. I couldn't see anything strange on the index.html page. All the same, could anyone who reads this please check it out and lemme know if it loads properly for you?

Thanks a bunch! Nico, over and out.

Animation Mentor has begun

January 4 was the big day. I finally started AM. I decided to do the Maya Springboard class first to fill in any significant gaps in my knowledge of Maya, to lose any bad habits, and to help develop a better work flow. As suspected, this class will be far less demanding then the future classes. The 1st 4 weeks will be orientation stuff, and then from week 4, it's orientation plus Maya Springboard content. The syllabus looks interesting and I'm keen to get stuck into it.

I've met some of my class mates, and we have a nice diverse range. I think AM'll be a pretty fun time, though when the busier times come I'll have to shut myself off the world a little. Good thing is that I have some other regular weekly stuff going on (work, piano lessons, church, etc) so I won't be completely blocked off and can still have a study-work-life balance :)

In the mean-time while I wait for week 4, I plan to continue reading the recommended animation books, doing Jason Ryan tuts, trying my hand at some more simple animation exercises, and just prepping in general. I also hope to keep this blog fairly visual - so will post some of my drawings and exercises that I haven't had the time to yet, and hereafter will attempt to post visuals as I go along.