Month 17: Animation Production/Preparing for Finals

It is the last month of the Computer Animation curriculum before our 5 months of finals starts. For this last month we are all only scheduled 1 class. This gives students time to take their art test if they have not already and, or start preparing for what they want to do for their demo reel.

 Animation Production is the final animation class. We again are working with the familiar bugsy rig, and this time we are completing and entire sequence with a group.

 (still frame from Shot 5)

So.... we were provided the scene/rig... and the cameras for the shots and the timing for how long the shots would be were already fixed. Our class was ONLY 4 people so we did not even have enough people to complete our sequence. To clarify..... there were about 12 shots and we each were to work on 2.

So there was 4 shots that were not even being worked on. This was the example or template that we were provided. (none of the simple stepped animation or anything in this was done by our group, it was just to use for reference.)

                                            (example/reference video)
We were then assigned 2 of the shots each.... I was responsible for shots 2 and 5. Our group had to pick a theme so our animations were consistent with each other and the character was not different from 1 shot to the next. We chose kind of a James Bond theme to keep it simple.

Here was my SHOT2 in the very early stages. Shot 2 had the worst camera angle and was really difficult to work on.

here was the completed version.

I really like my shot 5 because it was just shoulders up. This meant I could really spend time focusing on facial expressions and hands.

Shot 5 Blocked out

and again, after working on it through the month.

 You can see a lot of the subtle things I did with the fingers.


So after our group finished our shots we compiled them together and I added some music for fun. 4 of these shots were not even from our class but from an earlier class.
Here is the completed sequence (again I ONLY worked on shots 2 and 5)

 So yeah, ...even though I don't plan on animating, I had a good time with this, and it was a good farewell to animation production and the basic curriculum of Full Sail.

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Finals Preparations

Besides that I spend a lot of my free time looking for images on google. I had to get 3 images approved for my shading and lighting demo reel so I spent a lot of the month just searching for 2 good still life's and 1 environment. I submitted around 20-30 images for approval but for one reason or the other they were not getting approved. Part of the problem was that I was being very picky about what I wanted to submit because I would have to spend so much time on them.

Finally I got these approved.

For PCC1 (portfolio content creation 1)

For PCC2 (this already looks really hard...)

 and my PCC3 enviornment

so thats IT for now. I already have PCC1 and PCC3 mostly modeled out but I am gonna save those for my next post.

From here on out my months go like.....
July - Portfolio Pre Production
Aug - PCC1
Sep - PCC2
Oct - PCC3
Nov - Portfolio Assembly