I'm totally like not dead!

so yeah......

Hi there blog... it's been awhile.

Just thought I would stop by and let you know that I am doing just fine, enjoying my first year of IT out here in Halifax it's quite the different spin from Truro but we all got to find our niche.

Anyways thought I would leave you with a little something before I go back to my dark room and continue programming (tell the pizza guy the money is on the table and to slide the food under the door).

Minacs Intro

so for my current job that I am working at, I was asked to create a short animation to show how animations could help in training and I came up with this.

Happy St. Patty's Day... not really

SO yeah I was asked to do a picture of a leprechaun for a friend, and after fooling around and doing some little sketches and what not I pulled this one out.

And there goes our summer.....

okay so yeah once again it's been some time, gotta keep pressing I guess anyways here's some of the highlights from the summer.

okay so first off I went to the beach over the summer (not enough apparently from my farmer's tan :P) but at the beach they had a sand castle competition and some of them were really really good.







yeah so that's just of a couple submissions that were there. Also over the summer I went across my first suspension bridge, BUT on my bike some local guys from back home are raking and cleaning up some areas in a forest in the valley and making a new bike trail full of twists and turns, bridges and a suspension bridge too which was a interesting experience. (it seems that I have the face in all my pictures that I am just about to fall off my bike, ... which was true :P)

Well look what we have here.....

Okay so I totally forgot the blog, and to be honest I have not been doing a whole lot of work on the computer or in the books cause of work, but next week my life goes back to normal and I should be back into the grind, so I got a aerial scene that I have been working on, it still needs some tweaking but here's the ver. 1.0 of it.

Want some crack?

so, this is my final animation for my second year of collage, too bad at the time when I had to present this, it was not done, so after having Peter tell me that I should finish it, I went back and completed it.

Beach Scene

so some time ago, in illustration class we had to do a "arial depth" painting, or something like that, anyways I decided to do a nice warm beach scene because I can't wait for summer again...

3D Lipsync

So in 3D we had to design/model a head in Maya and then grab a sound clip of our choice from the internet and I found a gem from anchorman and I think that it turned out alright.

Work term reflections

well from all of this I think I have learned a lot, I have learned about line quality and how to make my animations look more cleaned and strong, also I have learned about the business and how the chain of command/work flow works, so now when I go into the industry soon I will have that already under my belt and be able to say that I have that experience.
I guess in general that this work term have only made me stronger in all aspects of animation and that I look forward to getting back in the loop.

Collideascope Work Term Journal

Flash lesson (1): bouncing ball

When doing a bouncing ball a animator has to remember two things: energy and timing.
When a ball bounces it will lose energy over time and cause the balls arcs to become more vertical rather then horizontal.
Spacing is another big issue, you want the ball to look as real as possible, but don't want to pull out 500 drawings.
Remember when going over a short distance slowly shoot on 2's, but when covering great distances over a short period of time, shoot on 1's

Flash lesson (2): banging arm

when animating anything that has a lot of energy a animator needs to remember recoil and reflex.
when a arm or a object hits another the object it hits exerts that much force back on it causing a ball to bounce or a arm to slightly lift after impact, this action is the recoil part, while reflex is when any part of the body lifts off a surface the joints in the body will act accordingly so a wrist will bend a bicep will flex, any part of the body will react in some way.

Flash lesson (3): inbetweening and masks

in animation when two actions have to happen at the same time it looks unnatural for both to happen at the same time, two people don't walk into a room at the same time or for test four's case 2 objects rise out of the water at the same time.



Flash lesson (4): fly in the mouth

for Ron, we had to make a outline of a path of action that a fly would take around the mouth, land and zip off the screen eventually, when Ron came to talk to us about what we needed to do for the fly he told us that we should treat the fly kinda like the ball that we did sometime ago, he said that if you treat the motion like the arc of a ball it would make that fly seem more real and would have a more "snappy" path of action to make it look nicer, so basically all things that a person animated goes right back to the 12 principals of animation.

Flash lesson (5): smearing

Okay so since day one, Ron has been talking to us about smearing our animations, which I wish I learned a long time ago cause for classical.
Smearing is used to blur frames together to get a nice smooth animation without drawing unnecessary frames, for flash animation smearing is a huge part and must be used correctly for it to work. when you have a small gap between frames and the animation is not moving very fast then you do not need to, but if there is a great distance between frames and the object is moving quickly then smearing can be used to make a smooth transition between frames

AAHHHH the work term ended ...... like a week ago

yeah so as the subject line states, I am out of a work term and now have the luck of finding a job like everybody else on earth, joy.
today I was out with some friends and I seen some of the Collideascope crew around for there lunch break and I got to talk to em, so it was good.
Anyways after I got home from lunch/shopping with some friends I picked up that blue pencil again and put it to work, the results weren't too bad.
Ivan is his name, I did the rough on paper and figured that I would use Flash to finish it up, well I think it came out alright, I changed some stuff along the way and some stuff works, others .... not so much ah well live and learn, he's a picture of him that I did.

Production Ahoy!!!!

well since I worked my butt off on trying to get good on line art, Ron said that I could actully help on D&J so this means that I am getting full work experience, another addition to my portfolio and as well I am getting paid :D
So I am super happy cause this is what I wanted from the begining and now it's actully happening, It feels SO good to say that I am part of the crew now.

Collideascope Work Term (week 2)

Well Ron has use plugging away at flash tests.... kinda boring but I am still learning stuff anyways.
Ron's got use doing all kinds of tests right now ranging from clean-ups to morphing two different characters.
Here's a little something that I did for one of the tests.



okay so I got my Morph done and uploaded on youtube, so this week I picked two characters and morphed one into the other, it's a little hard to make out but it's still good...

Collideascope work term (week 1)

Okay, so here it begins the crazy work term, I went in on Friday to talk to Ron and get a feel for the place and I gotta say; wow! That place is crazy, the first day that I am there we found a desk just sitting outside on the curb and well it all went nutty from there.
Ron decided that we would go out there and film on of his co-workers while he sat there at the desk and pretended that he just got fired and his new office was at that desk on the street, boy oh boy did we get some lookers wondering what the heck we were up to.
It was pretty fun though and I got to be in one of the videos so that was cool and OH YEAH! Global News came by and filmed us for the weather segment of there show so that was cool too, I gotta say that I hope all days at Collideascope are that interesting.

Stopmotion Final

Dillon Tatlock another first-year DIAN student and I worked on this piece, I really like it, we had fun working on this.

Jazzersize

well here is my Jazzersize from first term, I think that I did a okay job on it.

here is the stopmotion that I worked on for my last piece, I like it cause I got to use my computer in this on :P

Rotoscoped Me.

Well I worked on this on and off for the longest time, but now I finished it and I am very happy and I enjoyed finishing it.

Ughhhh..... I got Blogged.....

Well there you go folks, it has finally happened. I got a Blog..... I thought that I would never make one since I would never use it, but now from being in Digital Animation, I have learned from both people in the industry and second-year students, that a Blog is one of those essential items a animator needs (like a pencil that never runs out, or a machine that could make a clone of yourself to do your work for ya.) Oh well I guess it's better then signing up with something like DeviantART. hmm.... now if I could only get people to visit my Blog....