Spring Break! (which was at the end of April...)

So, what did I do!? First thing, I went to a cool lunch with people from the term below me. Mario and Paolo had an Italian costinata. It was great! I got to know the people in that class a little better and got to eat delicious Italian food.

Later in the week, I went up to Grouse Mountain for a hike. It was pretty difficult for me (since I haven't done cardio exercise in a long time) AND not all of the snow melted yet, so I could have died several times... (Dont worry mom, i didnt die). But I did take some great pictures.










We played frisbee several times at English Bay. It was a good time. We decided to go on a trip to Vancouver Island (10 of us) to stay at a place called Tofino for 3 days. Ill tell you about that in the next post.

...Continued from previous post

So, at my presentation, I presented the original story idea and animatic, since I put so much work into all of that. I did tell everyone after that I changed my idea. They seemed ok with it, so I was feeling good. After the presentation I talked to Sarah about what sort of guidelines I should follow for creating an exercise based demo reel, and she said she would tell me everything at the start of term 4. Great!

So, fast-forward one week, Cecilia had a party at her apartment for our last day of term 3. At about 12:00 am or so, all of the animators in the class recieved an email from Sarah saying that she is leaving VFS temporarily to work as a lead animator on some project. You can imagine how we all felt. This woman had seen all of our projects and was supposed to be our animation teacher for the next 3 terms. Wow! Dont forget, I have no idea what to do with my project........

Huh, so, I tried to enjoy my break. Luckily, I did.

What did I do during spring break!?!??!
(to be continued...)

Wow, im bad at this recently...

So the last post I made, which was in April but actually published today, was waaaay back in term 3. So much has changed regarding my presentation and stuff since that post.

Before, I wrote that in term 3, we create ideas for our final project and speak to our mentors to get help and suggestions. I wrote that I was nervous about the presentation I had in the next few days. Well, I was actually extremely stressed. I was struggling with my story idea and basically anything to do with my final project. I created a cool little character (which I will post here when I get to school tomorrow), but I still felt that I was getting nowhere with everything. I spoke to my mentor, Sarah, about my story and she gave me suggestions. Basically she was pulling ideas out of nowhere. SOoo, I quickly went to work overhauling my story, only to have another mentor tell me that what I had before this was better. I struggled some more and decided to make a decision and start creating a 3D animatic.

I spent about a week creating the animatic for a meeting with George, then another half of a week recreating/changing it. One stress-filled evening when I was feeling hopeless and angry, (two days before our final presentation and a week before the end of term) I frantically e-mailed Sarah (the animation mentor) to tell her I was going to ditch my idea. So imagine that, something I spent 2 months + creating and braingstorming for, tossed out...

Let me explain why I did this. Prior to my decision we had a animator guest speaker from Rythem & Hues (a vfx company) come to speak to us about work. We are all so focused on our demo reels here and he pointed out that for an animator, all they look for there is simple exercises that really showcase your skills as an animator, not a story teller. They dont give a shit about the story, sound, visual look, or anything like that. They just want to see straight up animation.

After this presentation, I started looking into other companies I wouldnt mind working for, and they are all basically requesting the same thing in a demo reel. So I looked at my "story" and animatic, and found I had barely any animation at all. There was lots of button pushing and lever pulling, which to me is not only boring, but doesn't display my skills as an animator. I finally decided that I would do a reel based solely on a variety of exercises. At that point, 2 days before the presentation, I felt like a huge weight was lifted, and I could finally relax.

I shall continue this in another post to keep it easier to read.

Whats new?

So, I thought I should update, since I haven't really updated in a while. Well, I'll briefly explain what I have been doing. This term has been intense. This is the term when we take our seedling ideas, and nurture them with the help from our instructors and the visiting mentors from the industry. They help us take our ideas and turn them into something not only doable, but will get us a job. I would like to create an animated short. I came up with the idea about 2 months ago. I have been struggling with it for the entire term. Ive been trying to get the details right, so I have been asking anyone and everyone for advice. This has led to several changes. I finally created an animatic (an animatic is like a story board, but it is 'animated' to show timing and sound), and presented it to my mentor George today. He told me some ways to fix it and some ideas for the ending which I will implement. I have 2 days to finish it (as well as a presentation) for Friday. I'm sort of stressed, but this should turn out well. I will post the entire presentation after it is finished (probably Thursday).

Also, I spoke with some students in the term below me who are Italian, but realized I have difficulty understanding them. They speak so fast and I have such a confused face, that they switch to English. I feel kind of slow. The Japanese feels a bit rusty too...

Wooo!

3 followers to my awesome blog!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111

Short break

So I finished my second term at VFS on this past wednesday. It went by fairly quickly. I got used to being at school all day everyday, so when they officially lock the school and kick us out, I felt like I didn't know what to do with myself! The next term starts tomorrow. I had a 5 day break basically. I suppose that is better than nothing.

In the meantime, I have been preparing for my third term. It is basically 2 months of pre-production work for our final demo reels. I am going to go into animation and although a story is completely unnecessary for a demo reel, it was suggested that having a narrative will give your characters a reason for doing the animations you are trying to show off. It might also help the desire for a more polished, complete look.

Right now, I have a very general concept that I would like to try and make into a short story/animation. I emailed a mentor here at school and discussed my idea. She said to try and pitch it in a sentence. Our goal for a final animation is 1:00 (she suggested closer to 50 seconds actually). It sounds extremely short, but remember, I have until October to finish an animation as best I can. That means I have to create a story, do all the pre-production work, model characters in 3D, texture these characters, create an environment (which will also have to be textured/shaded), set up lighting, ANIMATE, render, composite, and edit everything by myself. Thats a lot of work. I am excited though. So anyway, I need to have two ideas to pitch to the mentors when I see them next week. I will be working on the stories/treatments and character designs today. I'll post some stuff once it is ready.

Here is that Conquistador finished more or less. I kind of effed up one of his eyes, but I don't feel like re-rendering it.

Term 2!!

So my second term has just finished (well almost). We had our presentations this past monday. Our presentations are a way for us to compile all of the "best" work from the term to show to all of our teachers at the same time. The whole class goes into a room with a projector and we watch everyone's twice. On the second run, each teacher gives critiques and makes comments about every little thing within the presentation. Its actually pretty cool, but getting everything ready for the presentation is extremely stressful. So, it would seem like a load is off of my shoulders, but, we still had three assignments to complete after the presentation, due monday, tuesday, and wednesday. I finished them all, but cant seem to properly render my model. You'll see in the video a model of a nude male which we had to complete in a bout a month or so. After that, we had one week to model an entire Conquistador in full armor... Its kind of insane.



Here is a picture of the Conquistador:
One shitty thing is, we had to model the pistol that you can barely see in a weekend. Its extremely detailed, but, you wouldnt be able to see that from it being hidden in its holster. You can see the full thing in the presentation though. This stupid conquistador is irritating me because I cant seem to render out a rotation of it. It renders 1 frame of 250, then crashes... Huhh, oh well.

So here's the presentation: Extra points for those who know the title screen reference!!!




Ok, well, Tell me what you think of everything.

- Michael

Where have I been?!

So its been a while, hasnt it. Sorry about the not posting in two months. Well, I don't even know if anyone is still following this, but thats ok. I had my Christmas break back in December and was home for two weeks. That was a good time. Getting back to school was interesting. The second term started up and the seemed to increasingly consume my time exponentially. What that means is, I have no social life :( Thats ok though! I don't need one right now. I need a job.. hah So my days usually go like this. Get up at 7:30, get to class by 9:00. Have classes until 4 (or sometimes 10 depending on the day) and get back home by 11:00pm. This is on the weekdays. 9-11. Weekends might be 11-1 or some crazy time like that. Ill show the results of the work when I have everything completed. Which should be in a couple weeks. So I appologize if I havnt kept in contact with anyone. I have to start setting an hour aside to go through e-mails and whatnot. Ill post again soon!

Presentation and junk

I had a brief presentation yesterday at school. It wasn't so much me presenting anything, but a video of my work being watched by the class and 2 teachers. I got feedback and critiques on everything I have been working on. Some people were going crazy this weekend from my class (i.e. not getting any sleep over this thing). They had really nice presentations, but in the end, the teachers focused only on our work. Its great to hear what needs work and what is looking alright. I suppose during my 2 week break I should continue practicing.

So as for how our classes work, I am with the same 30 people everyday for my classes. We are like a family. Our class is 3D77. Since I was at school for about 20 hours this weekend (I slept between saturday and sunday, dont worry) working in the lab, I had a chance to meet more of the people from the previous term, 3D76. They are pretty interesting people! Everyone is incredibly nice and it is good to interact with eachother and ask questions.

一人の３D７６の人はYoutubeで、日本のゲーム番組を見ていた。私そこに行って、見ながら、紹介した。面白いことに、その学生は日系カナダ人で、両親は彼に子供のころから、日本語を教えていた。びっくりしたことに、彼も名古屋に住んでいた！なぜか聞かなかったけど、面白いだ！日本語を練習できて、懐かしい名古屋について話せる！いいね。

Ok, I just wanted to practice a little Japanese. I dont feel like translating it though.
So here is the presentation:

Animation! continued

There's one more line test that I wanted to add, I just forgot to upload it. It is a front walk cycle. I like this guy a little more than the others.



Finally, I wanted to give out the links of my instructors. They are all really amazing.

Pat Heinicke My Classical Animation teacher

Emily Nguyen Pat's teacher's aid (who is effing only 20 years old!!?)

Mike West My Character Design teacher. Very talented artist.

Animation!

Remember how I wrote I take classical animation along with the 3D? Well, I finally have some (crappy) animation exercises that I can show. They are really simple and quite standard (nothing to be excited about) but I think it is a good way for me to look back later on, and see my progress (if there is any of course).

The first is a stick guy cracking a whip. The exercise was to teach us about secondary animation. The guy's arm is driving the whip and we had to figure out how to make the whip look like it is following the arm correctly.



This next one is a walk cycle of a boring character from the side.

Almost break time!

Ive been pretty busy at school, getting things done before the end of the term. I have about one and a half weeks left before I finish. I have to compile some of my work from each class to present to my instructors for critique. So, I have been staying at school and correcting much of my completed work. Its going fairly well; but there seems to be so much more to do. I will keep you updated on my progress here.

In the meantime, AJ sent me this link. http://www.playauditorium.com/

Its amazing. Its a simple game but it combines audio and visual so well. It is addicting and challenging, but rewarding simply to hear what music will be created. Definitely check it out.

American Thanksgiving in Canada!!

On Saturday the 29th, I celebrated Thanksgiving. As you know from the previous post, I had school all day on the 27th, so no time for turkey. I made the suggestion to the American students that we should try and get together on Saturday for dinner. Everyone in the class was invited. Well, it turns out that many people really wanted to join! So, Cecilia was a gracious hostess and hosted the dinner at her apartment.

During the day before the dinner, we decided to go to Costco to get food. Cristal has a Costco card from Mexico and it works here too. We checked for turkey, but Canadians celebrate a Thanksgiving holiday in October and it was still too early for Christmas turkey. So, we decided to get 3, 3-4 lb. chickens and roast them. I got some ingredients for corn bread too.

I went to Cecilia's apartment after that and started to cook the chickens. I made garlic lemon butter to put under the skins of each chicken and topped them with lemon slices. They smelled really good as they cooked. People slowly started to show up at that point. Everyone brought a little something too, food or wine, or something to share. Once the cornbread was done (it was started after the chicken, only one oven) it was time to eat. I have to say, everything that everyone made was really delicious! It was a great dinner all around. It was really cool too because this was a first Thanksgiving dinner for probably half of the people that came. There were 14 or 15 people that went I think. Great! I have many pictures from the night, so take a look.


Andrej seems pretty happy about Thanksgiving.


I think Cristal is dancing?

This picture kind of looks like a 90's sitcom intro. All we need is Cristal's name in yellow at the bottom.

Here's some food.

Getting ready to eat.

Cecilia wanted a picture of all the shoes.



Cecilia serving desert. It was very good.


TEXAS!

Thanksgiving

Hello. So today is Thanksgiving! This will be the first time I am away from home on Thanksgiving Day. Im also in a different country, so we dont celebrate it here. In fact, today we get an extra class! I have school from 9:oo am until 4:00 pm, and one at 7:00-10:00! How great! There are only about 6 or so American students in my class, but I think this saturday the class would like to get together and celebrate. We are going to have a dinner or something, so it should be fun. Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Sculpture

Hey there. I said that I would post some pictures of my sculpture (work in progress) so here they are.




He's modeled after a drawing I made of a man on the cover of a National Geographic. It was just going to be a random sculpture for practice, but I think I might end up trying to incorporate him into my final animation.

Food fight!

I thought this comic was pretty hilarious.
It comes from a web-comic called The Perry Bible Fellowship. I suggest taking a look. Most of the comics are horrible (ethically and morally) yet amazingly funny!

Party and VFX

I figured I would put this post in a separate post from the classes. Otherwise it would be too much to read. A friend had a party last night. We try to get as many people from our program to hang out as much as possible. They are one of the best learning tools we have. So, my roommate Andrej and I all arrived there at about 10. We were surprised to see my 3D modeling teacher there. He's only a few years older than me and was a student at the school a few years ago. It was actually really cool. We asked him all sorts of questions about school, working, and animation stuff. I'm starting to realize how huge this industry for 3D animation and Visual Effects is. I could potentially end up anywhere in the world. Depending on what field I get into, I might have to move around a lot too. I'm not sure what to expect, but I am pretty excited.

While at the party, I was talking to a few people from the 3D program that are in their fifth term (there are six terms per year for 3D, and each term a new group of students starts). These students are almost complete, so it was interesting to hear their stories. They are all so busy with school it seems.

Today, about 10 students (me included) from my program went to Granville Island hotel for a VES (Visual Effects Society) event. Well, the hotel hosted a reception but the event took place at a nearby art school. We heard from speakers from various studios in Vancouver and California. The visual effects industry is really interesting. There are obvious examples like the Matrix or Harry Potter movies; however, there was an example of when visual effects are used in a way that you don't even notice them. The example was the movie Changeling, with Angelina Jolie. The movie is set in San Francisco in the 1920's I believe. The effects were used to create things like extensions to the scene. There are buildings there were added digitally. There are also digital "extras" to add a bit of variety. During the credits, there is a 2 minute shot of a road with foot and car traffic. There were real extras and real cars for the first 30 seconds or so, but the rest of the time the cars and people are all digital. It is completely seamless.

So, basically, this event was a good taste at what VFX has to offer. By my fourth term, I have to select a path. I can choose modeling, animation, or VFX. The more I learn about each, the easier I think it will be for me to make a decision. I still cant decide if I want to work with movies, commercials (which seems kind of lame, but I can make a lot of money and the studios are all over) or with video games. In February, my school will be hosting a video game event. I will hopefully have a better idea of how the gaming industry works with animation.

School update

I have been fairly busy these past weeks so I have not been able to update regularly. School is still going well. We are already going on to week five; the time seems to be flying already. I am getting used to my classes and my classmates. I am starting to understand who is good at what and how we can all work together. I'll update you on my classes and give my class schedule!

Classical Animation: This class meets on Mondays and Thursdays for three hours each. We have learned the basics of animation and are applying them in simple exercises. Due on Monday is a "whip" assignment in which a simple (very simple) character cracks a whip. Its interesting to draw everything and so rewarding when you see the little guy moving!

Sculpture: This one meets on Monday nights, from 6:00-9:00. Its a very relaxed class where we build a bust of a human (or human like) character out of Super Sculpey. Its great so far. I have my model basically complete. On Monday I will smooth out some texture, add a hat, and continue adding more texture and details. Its really been an interesting class.

Character Design: This class is on Tuesdays from 9:00-12:00. Its exactly what it sounds like. For Tuesday's homework assignment, I had to create a "character line-up". I was just supposed to create characters with with no detail. The teacher wanted each to represent a different archetype. The character lineup is used all the time in pre-production for film and video games. Its helps create a size relationship between the characters. In addition to this assignment, I had to create 5 faces as different as possible. After that, I had to pick one face and draw it with 5 emotions. It was a good exercise.

Life Drawing: This class is on Tuesdays from 1:00-4:00. I feel like I am getting more loose with my drawings. I am taking what I have learned from previous classes and applying it naturally when I draw. I am very pleased with the progress.

3D modeling: I have this classes on Wednesdays and Fridays from 9:00-12:00. I am using software called XSI. It has recently been purchased by Autodesk. Autodesk is apparently trying to monopolize the entire 3D software market. In this class I just finished modeling a dog! Its really fun. We are working on rigging it now. Simply put, we are adding an animateable structure to the dog (bones really).I will post images of it later. After this assignment, I think we will model a toy car.

Texturing: This is a new class from 1:00-4:00 on Wednesdays. It will take us through the basics of applying textures and materials to models we create in our other classes.

History of Animation: 5:00-8:00 on Wednesdays. Basically, we go to a theater on campus and watch cartoons. Our teacher is very passionate about animation and has a lot of knowledge on the subject. It also sounds like a documentary whenever he talks. I found out we will have two assignments. The first will be a quiz, and the second is to draw our teacher. He showed us small collections of drawings that previous students created and they are hilarious. This is going to be such a fun assignment.

Composition: This class is thursdays from 1:00-4:00. Its a fairly boring class in which we draw compositions based off of small paragraphs from stories. The next assignment was a passage from this horribly written amateur action/horror story... Our guidelines are to draw a part of the story and use only two colors (not black and white).

Photoshop: Its a new class this week on Thursdays from 7:00-10:00pm. I dont know what to expect.

3D animation: This class is on Fridays from 1:00-4:00. Here we take the principles of animation we use in 2D, and apply them in 3D. My assignment for next week is to have a simple character (a pair of legs) jump off of a box. Its pretty neat.

So thats all of my classes.

More Animations

Here are a couple more animations I saw yesterday. The first one was created by Pixar. I believe it is a short that came out just before Wall e.


via videosift.com

The next was a winner at Siggraph 2008.


This one was also in the 2008 Siggraph show:


Enjoy!

Cultures and Connections

I came to Vancouver to learn animation. Well, that's what I thought at least. I am starting to realize that this is not the only thing I am gaining from being here.

Sure, in school I am learning all about animation, but my 3D modeling teacher made a very important point at the end of class yesterday. He said that one of the most important parts of being at VFS is our peers. Each student in my class is learning like I am, but each is also a good teacher. We can go to eachother for help when its needed.

One other thing I like about my classmates is how we are all from differnt backgrounds and cultures. We come form all over the world. There are three students who speak Spanish as their first language, but each comes from a different country. To me, a non-spanish speaker, it is really interesting to listen to them talk. I can hear the differences between Mexican spanish, Spanish from Barcelona, and Venezuelan Spanish. Its been great for me too, because I have been speaking Italian quite a bit. Two of the Spanish speakers speak Italian very well and the girl from Turkey also knows a bit. I have learned how international South Park is. I have learned three new English words (from non-native speakers), and I learned that Hungarian is probably one of the most difficult languages for English speakers to learn/speak (it is one of the few languages in Europe that is not indo-european).

Yesterday, some friends came over to the apartment. Justin, Caio, Andrej and I went to KFC. Yea, fancy. It was Caio's very first time eating KFC, so he was excited. We were supposed to go to another person's house after, but we were procrastinating. We decided to go to a liquor store and purchase some alcohol. Canada has a riducilous tax on alcohol which causes a regular sized bottle of Grey Goose Vodka to go from a normal USD price of about $30-50 to being $109.99. It was insane. So we managed to get semi-cheap alcohol, and headed back to my apartment. We played video games and watched animation things (yea, thats what animation students do in their free time) until Cecilia and Panya came over. We started to play some card games that Caio was teaching us. One was called Truco. It was quite interesting, but it was taking me too long to get the hang of it. He taught us like 50 other popular Brazilian card games after that too. It was fun.

So, here is one of the short animations we watched:

Watch falling art.divx in Animation  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Its quite disturbing, but the character design is amazing. I will look for more of the animations we watched and post links a little later.