Strong the Force is, with ILM

We had our 2 hour Q&A last night with Delio Tramontozzi, Kevin Martel, and Charles Alleneck and that's Shawn Kelly in the background taking a picture.

It was very informative and they ripped through a ton of questions. Quick Highlights:

The question I was going to ask was about reference material for General Grievous, but someone asked it before I had a chance. Delio had his hand in a lot of the General Grievous animations. He talked about the scene where Grievous drops and runs on all 6 limbs. For reference he used spiders for the speedy take off, crabs for the sideways recovery and scorpions for the forward walk motion. Pretty damn whip ass.

Someone said the scene with with the Emperor and Yoda fighting in the Senate area looked like Q-Bert.

How can these old characters (Yoda, Emperor, Count Dooku) that can hardly walk, start jumping around and kicking ass when it comes time to fight?....the force, of course.

The facial animations and the overall animations on Yoda were purposely toned down to match the puppet used in the first films.

Frank Oz is a bad ass puppeteer. Back on Empire Strikes Back he really had a hard time controlling Yoda's ears. The ears were kind of erratic and he couldn't stop the weird movement they were making. So when ILM animated the CG Yoda, they put those same ear movements in. Frank Oz visited ILM and saw the ear movements and couldn't believe they copied his mistakes into the CG Yoda. I don't think I am explaining that well, but it was funny, you had to be there.

Delio is the walk behind the clones, he is the person they used for most all of the mo-cap. So they are really clones of Delio, not Jango...heh....

If I think of more, I'll post it.

Class 2 Session 1

Revision No Arms

I have plans for this little animation over the next couple of weeks. Our first assignment was to create a walk with personality and use advanced overlapping techniques. I really wanted to go extreme with the overlapping. It was even more extreme but I toned it down a bit.



I messed around with the timing after he pauses and I think that worked well. I did go a little over the allotted frames though, but I had to in order to make it read well towards the end.

I’ll update it with any comments from Master Dooley once I see my ecritique for this week. Oh, speaking of Masters. The Star Wars Episode 3 Q&A is tonight! Man, I am really excited about this one. There were some awesome animations in that movie and I can't wait to talk to Delio Tramontozzi, Kevin Martel, and Charles Alleneck.

So kick ass, I know it will be....(Yoda voice) heh, not that funny.

Power Horse is for Animators

I am a connoisseur of energy drinks. I drink coffee most of the day, but when I get 3 hours of sleep and have to go to work for 10 hours, I usually pick up a SoBe Adrenaline Rush a 180 or a Red Bull to replace a cup of coffee. Not anymore.




We had our first Q&A last night with Doug Dooley starting at around 10:00 PM Central. We had a great session with non-stop information the entire time. It ended right around 11:30. I was really pumped up after the class, so I didn’t feel tired, just inspired.

Doug Dooley is a full blown Jedi master. It's not because he animated one of my favorite scenes from The Incredibles (cat in the tree) along with many other kick ass scenes from many other kick ass movies. It's because he has a damn second story in his freaking cubicle at Pixar with a couch and cable TV! He’s a Jedi, if ever there was one.

Anyway, I was eager to get my ideas for my assignment from paper to computer after the q&a. I got into it, laying out keys on our new character Stewie. Problem is I didn’t get to bed until around 2:00 AM. I had to be up for work in 3 hours!

I get up at 5:00 AM...[SNOOZE]....5:09 [SNOOZE] 5:18.......damn, I started moving. It felt like I was in quicksand with transparent tape stuck over my eyeballs.....but I made it out of the house on time.

On my way to work, with that full moon still hanging around, I stopped to get an energy drink. I saw this new one called Power Horse. It looked kind of different, so I read the label. It has more good stuff [B12, Taurine, Caffine, etc.] than SoBe, so I bought it, sucked it down, didn’t like the taste, but holy mother of Bill, I am still not tired and it’s almost 11PM. If you need an energy drink, try Power Horse. Damn, I sound like a commercial, but I wouldn’t write it if it wasn’t what I felt. Actually, I wouldn’t be writing right now, if I wouldn’t have had it this morning.

I Shouldn't Have Slept on This

OK, so being in school and totally focusing on animation has rekindled my love for Looney Tunes. I wanted to buy "The Looney Tunes Golden Collection" since it was first released, but I held off until now. I finally got a copy of the 4 dvd set last week and I totally recommend it to anyone that loves animation. There are 56 shorts with all the great Looney Tunes characters. There are also some fantastic extras. Here’s a great write up.



One eye opening extra was “The Boys from Termite Terrace”. Bob Clampett, Friz Freleng, and Chuck Jones plus voice actor Mel Blanc, all being interviewed. Man, I am just a huge fan of all these guys. Especially Friz Freleng, and seeing Mel Blanc doing some of the voices live is just very inspirational.

I can’t wait to buy the Golden Collection part 2...soon...

Summer Moon Illusion

Lowest-hanging full moon in 18 years.

Yeah, it’s eye trickery at its best. Full moon is Wednesday the 22nd. Don’t miss it.

Doug Dooley

My new mentor for Term 2, "Body Mechanics" is Doug Dooley.



"Doug has been working as a character animator since 1995, after graduating with a computer animation degree from Ringling School of Art and Design. He spent 4 and a half years working as a character animator at Blue Sky Studios were he worked on several commercials and movie effects, as well as being a lead animator on the Oscar winning short animation “Bunny.” Currently he is a character animator at Pixar Animation Studios, were he worked on Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, and The Incredibles. He is currently helping set up animation production on Pixar's 2006 movie."

I can't wait to meet the guy, I totally respect his work. Here's an interview with him from October 1999 talking about Bunny. I can't find much else on the net about him, but once I do I will post it here.

NOW THEN

What did professional comic artists draw like when they were 12 years old, you ask? The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art is pleased to answer the question with NOW THEN.

Very fun stuff. Some of their *then* art is better than my *now* art lol....sad. Be sure to check out the bio pages for the artists.

NOW THEN

What a ride

I saw this on Jason Schleifer's blog and thought it was fantastic.

It's a great animation called Le Building

End of the First Term

Ballie Walk Perspective View

OK, so this week our assignment was to take one of our walks and show it in a perspective view with hip rotation.

I worked on the hips and once I had it close and was happy with it, I thought I could work on some overlapping. I planned to have Tailor come over the wall and scare Ballie, then run/bounce away. Then I thought well, maybe Tailor could lunge at him a little, Ballie could jump back a little, then Tailor could run/bounce off. Needless to say, I got a little carried away as the planning went along. The attack was something that just snowballed once I started brainstorming. Eventually I got to where Tailor went rabid and jumped on Ballie and knocked him over.

Then I got it to the computer I blocked it out and I liked it. Then I showed my wife and she was like, “hehe, is he kissing him at the end or what?”

What? Kissing? Hell no, he’s supposed to be chewing his face off! Ballie is clearly scared of Tailor with his knees shaking and he jumps back! I immediately had to revise.

Yeah, she saw the knees shake the third or 4th time she watched it. But the animation looked more like a Dino licking Fred Flintstone scene, than the Cujo killing Human scene that I was going for.

So I added the 3 pounces towards the end to make sure there was no confusion. Ballie got his ass kicked and that’s all there is to it. Now my wife won't watch it, because it's too violent.

I am pretty happy with the overlapping on the tail. I’ll wait to see what Dave Burgess says about it before I change anything though. It was damn good practice.

Well, it's been a great 12 weeks. I can’t wait to see who my mentor is next term. I can't believe how much I have learned about animation. I can't believe how inspiring the people (mentors, mentees, and the big 3) are. Bring on the next class!

Compilation of AM work

OK, I am going to start updating this thing regularly.....starting now.

I took all of my favorite AM assignments and made a Term 1 Test Reel.

Take a look: AM TERM 1 TEST REEL

I revised a few of the older tests and changed the view to perspective in a couple of them.

I still have to fix my idiotic walk from last week. Yeah, I blew it on that one. Tried to be different. I knew everybody was going to do a sneak so I didn't want to do that. So what I did was filmed myself doing this crazy looking pimp walk. Yeah, Ballie represents me in this one. But, it really didn't turn out anything like I wanted, and when I realized that it sucked (sometime Saturday morning), it was already too late. Anyway, I'll revise that this week.

I will also replace that 3/4 walk at the beginning of the test reel with my new 3/4 walk with hip rotation from this week.