Class!

Well, the whole reason I came to Vancouver has finally started. Monday was my first day of classes. Since this program is only a year long, I have one real break during the end of December for only two weeks. Besides that, I have school continually for the next year. Because of this, the classes are set up different from normal semester based schools. I have a series of terms, each about 7 or 8 weeks long. The first three or four terms are used to build skills such as life drawing, composition, animation concepts, and more fine-art related courses instead of computer animation. This is mainly because an animator must understand how things move and be able to apply those mechanics to any media.

Monday, I had a basic intro "meeting" in order to learn about the school, meet my program managers, and get a tour of the building where most of my classes are. After this, I had classical animation. Finally, I had a sculpture course. The day started at 10 and ended at about 8:30 or so.

The classical animation class is quite interesting. My teacher is great. Besides being completely passoinate about animation, he is also able to remember 30+ people's names he meets for the very first time (Many of them with difficult to pronounce names too)! We learned basic concepts in animation (many I had known from previous courses at DePaul) and applied them to the standard "Bouncing Ball" exercise. This assignment is one that pretty much every animator does. All it is, is an animation of a ball bouncing. Whats great about it, is that a circle is quite simple to draw, and it teaches many animation concepts.

The next class was sculpture. Here, our goal is to sculpt a bust of basically any human or human like form we can imagine. We are using super sculpey because it is clean and easy to work with. This class is to help us get used to translating a drawing into the 3D world.

Today, I had only two classes. The first was Character Design, followed by Life Drawing. Character design is exactly what it sounds like. Its a great class. Our first assignment is to create 10 "characters" out of simple shapes. There will not be any details. I have a greater respect for cartoonists after starting this project. In the case of human characters, they have to have a great understanding of the body and how it is proportioned, as well as how it moves. They are able to take that knowledge and exaggerate it (both in design and how it moves) which really is quite amazing. I will show work if I have anything worth seeing...

Life drawing was also great. Its a 3 hour long class. Wanda, our model, came a few minutes late, but when she did, the instructor made us draw her for about 30 mins. We had 30 second poses, 2 min poses, a five minitue, and a 20 min pose. Our instructor wanted to see everyone's skill level. After this, he jumped right into giving techniques. He slowly divulged information througout the class, and each time he did, it seemed like my drawings became a little better (at least my understanding did). What I like about this teacher is that he explains a techniqe for drawing and looking. He told us to not be so concerned with what we think we see, but what we actually see. Ive heard this from every art teacher, but he really explained it well. By the end of the class, I felt a lot looser and more comfortable with my drawing. This is definitely noticable in the quality of my drawings. I am excited to see where I end up after several weeks.