The Challenge is over

Well the summer has been over for a while, but I never got around to making these final posts. I got swept up by thesis, which has been so much fun.

Here is an over view of all the shots I did over the summer

It was so much fun and I feel like I learned so much from these exercise. I would like to thank David Torres for the idea. I tried my best to keep to the original assignment. I would also like to thank everyone gave me there thoughts on how to make my shots better. All the comments were much appreciated.

I am still accepting crits and comments because these shots might make my reel this year and if they do I want to go back and polish up some things.

I also would like to know what shots you guys like best. I always like to get others thoughts on what shots they like because I can't look at these objectively. And if you feel like it you can tell me if any of the shots are just not working or just stink. Don't worry I can take the bad news.
Here is a reel of all the shots in chronological order and below the video is a link for each shot that you can download.


Well it’s been fun but it looks like this blog is seen its last post.



below each picture is a link to the animation

thanks for stopping by

BYE!



CLICK ME!




CLICK ME!





CLICK ME!





CLICK ME!





CLICK ME!


















Peace Out
-Scott

11 Second Club Progress

Some people have asked me to see my process work. I tried my best to keep track of my process on this shot,

Usually when I start a shot I will make a list of ideas and concept that might work well for the chosen dialogue. Once I have come up with my concept and characters start freely brainstorming poses and thumbnails. I do some initial thumbnails before I shoot reference to really get the creative juices flowing. I also come up with internal dialogue and any other thought processes the characters might have. Once I have some ideas I then get up and shoot some reference. I will start off by improving the scene a few times to see if I come up with any happy accidents. Then I do some intentional acting. his is were I am trying to act out the poses and ideas I came up with in my initial thumbnails. I then sit down and watch the reference , make some notes and then start doing some finalized thumbnails and ideas.


Once I fully understand what I want to do in the shot I start blocking out my scene. I typically work in stepped and stay in stepped till it is all on twos or fours. I start of by blocking the main story poses. I try to really quickly get the try to read in as few poses as possible. I then i keep breaking things down until I ma happy with it. I then shift it over to linear where I shift my keys around till i getting looking as good as possible by just messing with the timing.

Finally I grin and bear and spline my animation and keep messing with curves till I run out of time.

So enough with the chit chat.

Here are some of thumbnails that I did over the course of working on the shot. It is everything from initial ideas to how I wanted to pose out the mouth. This is only about a third of them.








Here are some videos of the animation in progress
These are thumbnails that I plugged into monkey jam to test out some timing stuff

Thumbnails for July 11 Second Club from smcwhinnie on Vimeo.

Here are some variations I had on my blocking pass








Then Someone on the forums suggested that I have an opening shot to show what the elf was looking at. I didn't think it was necessary, but I always like to give things a shot because you never know it could be brilliant.




More progress




More progress




2nd pass Splinning




Here is an alternate version I was working with




Here is the final version
Still needs a lot of work, but don't they always

11 Second Club

This past July I participated in the 11 second club competition. To my suprise I placed 3rd, which was super cool and exciting. It was so much fun working on this shot and getting everyone's feedback on the progress of the shot. It was so nice to finally get some feedbackon my shots, becausefor a while I have felt like I was animating in my own little bubble. I was really excited to get back to school to get back in that creative enviornment.

Anyway here it is...

http://www.11secondclub.com/competitions/july11/entry/0peki1

In my next post I will be posting some of the progress of this shot

More Animation Studies

Here are a few more animation studies I did over the summer




Since I have been doing a lot of facial animation I wanted to look at some nice facial animation from How to Train Your Dragon and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.




And this next shot I looked specifically at the hands for one of the shots I was working on over the summer.



These are just a few studies that I wanted to share.

Winnie the Pooh

So I saw Winnie the Pooh because it is amazing and you should do the same. The story was so-so but it was so funny, I couldn't stop laughing.

Here are a few of my favorite clips. The acting on these shots is so good it is sickening.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgcwFWoY83k

In this first shot I love how when pooh hears that the honey is gooey and he responds by saying it is his personal favorite and he bites down on the paper is so cool. the timing and posing and spacing on that shot is just perfect.
Since this was a traditionally animated film you can do cool little things like when Owl says "gooey" his eyes get this crazed look. Another personal favorite(haha)shot of mine was when pooh says " ...especially the strange one" The facial animation is spot on even though they are working with just a couple of dots for eyes. The animators on this film are amazing and I would love to pick there brains about some of the shot. Thank You Disney for sticking to traditionally animated movies.

So I was planning on talking about a few clips on this post but half way through I decided to spilt it up into multiple posts so expect s few more of these. Plus more animations

UPDATE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So I got some great notes on the piece with the kid with the shoes. This shot has been a real tough one, but I think kit is getting better. Still not where i want it yet but I figured I would post where I was at with. There are still some notes I got that I am trying to figure out if they will work. Like a got a note about possibly having him pull the shoes towards him instead of pushing them away. i really liked that note but I could not get it to work with this guys huge head, but I am going to give a few more whacks at it because I think it could be really cool. Also opened up the shot a bit to clear up his mouth and clarify things. It was amazing how much better the piece got by just doing that. I think the first time i meet with David Torres he told the entire class that "Clarity is King" or something along those lines.( not sure if those were the exact words)Still got a lot of work to do on this shot but it has been nice to have a challenge this is something very different from what I normally do.

thanks everyone for all the great comments. i have a new shot in the planning that I will actually be posting more of the progress and showing how I go about animating a shot because i got some request to show the progress of my shots.

shoes from smcwhinnie on Vimeo.

and I forgot to thank Adam Cambell on my last post for this rig

yeah a new shot

So here is my new shot not done but I'm going to take a break from it for a bit and work on fixing up one of my old shots. But i wanted to post it here to get some feedback before I finish it up. But come July I am going to do the 11 second club no matter what the audio is and hopefully that will turn out nice.