alexiss dawn

Despite the lack of posting the last couple of weeks, I am indeed still alive. It’s been quite busy getting everything set for the move and just meeting up with people for a few last times. I went out with Utah AMers, met up with a friend, even went camping for a few days with my family. And I also got the chance to drive down to Southern Utah and meet up with a mentor/friend of mine that was in town. Sweet. It’s been a really good time and nice to take it a bit more chill.

And now, I’m just finishing up packing, hoping that I’m bringing what I need. I fly out tomorrow morning and start on Monday. It’s definitely going to be a few crazy days at least. I’m excited — just ready for it to happen…now. I’m also excited to get back to New York — this pic above is from my last trip I made out there in 2006 to visit everyone from when I lived out there. The Toys R Us in Manhattan is amazzzzing. Woo!

Once I get moved I’ll be back into the groove of blog posting — just give me a week! I’ve been working on another dialogue test as well as a shot for an alumni project that I’m involved with. It’s been pretty fun so I’m excited to post it up for you guys to see. And I have plenty of animation goodies to share with you guys as well. So stay tuned and stick with me — I’ll be back online fully soon!

New York or bust!

Well folks, I think that’s the first time I didn’t update on a Monday in 18 months! It has been one heck of a last couple of weeks. I just got back from California tonight where I had an absolutely incredible time. I drove down with 5 other Utah AMers to San Francisco for the Animation Mentor BBQ, open house, and job fair. I also organized a Wall-E screening for 174 AMers — whoa!! I could banter on and on about everything that happened — it was so great to get to see everyone! And to get to meet so many people I hadn’t met face to face yet. It seriously is an amazing situation to be in — the passion that everyone has only amps up when we get together. I felt like a little kid at Christmas all weekend.

(Image from Carlos’ blog)

So the job fair was great — AM brought in several studios that we could talk with and drop off our reels. I have to admit I spent a good portion of the time getting distracted every time I saw another AM alumni walk in. We had the open house right after and then we all went to dinner before we headed off to see Wall-E. It was just a never ending night.

The BBQ was great as well — spent all day and night with AMers. I think we all forget to eat much — so many people to see, so many people to talk with, eating comes last.

So a great weekend. As for some news, well, I have some. I am headed to New York to work at Blue Sky Studios! Crazy! It was completely unexpected and caught me off guard to the point that I was speechless! I’ll be working on Ice Age 3 out there! I’m really excited for so many reasons — the experience is going to be great. It’ll be great to work with some of my mentors from Animation Mentor as well. It is definitely intimidating but that challenge is what makes it exciting!

(This is what I have felt like this week! Fitting, eh?)

A huge weekend — I didn’t want it to end. I love the people from AM. Our family there is incredible. A big, big thanks to everyone that made the weekend incredible. From going out at night, to meeting for lunches and dinners, thank you guys. You made the experience incredible!! THANK YOU!!!

And by final, I mean “final”. Still some tweaks to be done. But I was able to make a lot of changes and improvements this last week after a killer eCritique and comments.

It’s been said many times that an animator is never done with a shot until it is pulled away from their hands. So I’ll be making some changes this week. One thing I’ve learned moreso this term is that polishing is going to come with time. With each eCrit I learned something new in ways to go about polishing this. I’ve been able to improve bit by bit each week but still have so, so much more to learn. But hey, that’s why I love this stuff — always more to dig into.

Also had to put together my final progress reel. We just included class 2-6 stuff so there are no bouncing balls or pendulums. It’s kinda cool to see the assignments altogether. To go from never having animated 18 months ago to finishing up my short film now is crazy.

More to come…

Almost there… this last week I did another polish pass on my film. I broke it up a bit different and will do the “final” pass this next week.

A bit of a scare this week as my computer decided to kill over and die Saturday night. Not even a year old and after a few hours of troubleshooting, found out it needs a new motherboard and quite possibly a new hard drive. Haha, I tell you, the timing couldn’t be worse. But the good news is that I’ve had a shadow box setup so my files are safe and my laptop has Maya to finish up this last week if I can’t get my desktop up and running quick enough. I definitely have to put in a plug for Memeo AutoSync. It saved my life this week with it’s syncing powers.

Cannot believe it’s the final assignment this next week. Crazy! I’ve been working on getting used to the idea early of my life as an AM student coming to an end. I’ll always be an AMer, but for the last 18 months this is what I’ve done!! We had a career services Q&A this last week and man, AM really takes care of their own, even once we become alumni. The Q&A was great and a bit calming to know how involved they are with us. It’s still up to us to do the work, but the AM support system is incredible.

Kung Fu Panda finally came out in theaters this last weekend! It’s been the most anticipated film of the year for me so I was super excited to go see it. I got to go see it with some AMers (we also ate at Panda Express before - ha!) and man, the film was incredible. The teams over at Dreamworks did an incredible job all around — the animation was great, the sets and backgrounds were beautiful, and the story was solid. It was unlike any DW film I’ve seen and they have seriously stepped it up several levels. If you haven’t seen it, this is a must-see-in-theaters film. We saw it in an IMAX and if you can, do it that way, just make sure to nab the back row.

And to wind down an incredibly eventful week, we had another AM Framegrabbers session on Saturday night. Every couple of months one of our AM alum sets up a video meeting with an animator in the industry. This time around it was with Jason Ryan. We always come into the session with a film sequence that person worked on and get to hear their approach to it and ask all of our questions. It was informative, motivational, and a really nice break away from my film for a couple of hours.

As an added bonus, the new iphone is sounding pretty sweet…can’t wait for July 11th to roll around. But for now, back to my film!

A link to the commencement speech J.K. Rowling gave today at Harvard was just getting passed around AM. I thought it was worthy to share here. I’m always looking for doses of inspiration, and this is one of those great ones. I’ll keep an eye out for the video of it, but for now, you can read the text of her speech on Harvard’s news site.

So many good tidbits in there, but one I especially liked:

What I feared most for myself at your age was … failure.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life…

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

EDIT: Just found an audio version of the speech along with text on the Harvard Magazine website. It has a link for the video so that should be coming soon.

Oy! Did I mention that time is speeding by? This last week I took the final third of my film into spline.

I also went through the first and second thirds working to incorporate my mentor’s notes, and to just work on polishing it up as a whole.

There’s a lot of work to be done still — polish is the secret word of the day, the week, the month! I have 2 more official weeks to finish this baby up. The final week at AM nothing is due and it’s just a final wind down week. Now that the big hurdle of transitioning to splines is over it’s time to get into the nitty gritty of it and work on making it shine. Like I said, lots to do! I’m still having a lot of fun with it though — it’s amazing how much you can learn each week and how much more there is to learn!

Just wanted to pass on a bit of good news! My team has been selected to compete in the second annual FJORG! Iron Animator Marathon at SIGGRAPH 2008! I’ll be partnering up with Jon Wondrusch and Ian Weyna, both AM alumni, for the event.

FJORG is a competition where 16 teams each work to create an animated sequence of at least 15 seconds in length to a maximum length of 45 seconds based on a theme to be provided at the main event, during 32 straight hours, using only those assets supplied at the event and their own talent and skills. 32 hours! Whoa!

And here’s some EVEN BETTER news: We’re not the only team made up of Animation Mentor students/alumni!! Out of 16 teams competing at FJORG, we have 4 AM teams!! How cool is that?! We’re all so incredibly excited to be there together and work to represent AM well! It’ll be a blast to just participate with so many AMers and the other no doubt talented animators!

Again, congrats to the other AM teams!

Crappy and Happy
Philip Rudolph
Remi Tjon Ajong
John Coomey

Studio TeAM
Chris Schloemp
Mark DeRidder
JJ Pastore

Digital Shamans
Natascha Evans
Sheldon Kruger
Francine Mangin

EDIT: With an email out I found out we have even more AMers participating — so a congrats to them as well!

Bill Buckley
Jay Grenier
Ken Robkin
Henry Sanchez
Brad Bradbury
Valerie Morrison
Hunter Brown

I can say it over and over, but man, time is flying by fast! Here’s the second third of my film with a first pass of polish/spline/all that jazz.

Word to the wise: make sure to take a moment to think if you should use arm align when blocking a shot. It’ll save you a lot of time down the road from having to change keys.

Things over at AM are going GREAT. So much is happening and I’m enjoying it all. There is some amazing work being done over there. Our lectures have taken a turn the last couple of weeks — they’ve recorded lectures with some of the recruiters from Pixar, Dreamworks, etc., talking about reels, connections, interviews, all that jazz. It’s really nice to get yet another insider view. Still have a lot of work to do before I even think about getting ready to apply, but talking about it is exciting. Seriously guys, AM preps you well. It’s great.

Three more weeks to finish this baby up! I’m still having so much fun with it and learning a ton from doing it. And man! It’s a blast! Seeing those little glimpses of that character spark are amazing. But as I said, a lot of work so back to work! Happy Memorial Day!

Things are speeding up and it’s getting busy! This last week we started polish on our films. That meant for me taking everything to spline. I blocked pretty tightly so it wasn’t too bad of a transition. Still rough patches but those will be cleaned up for the next, and final go around.

Last week was a great week. So much going on, I just can’t have any complaints. We had a Horton Hears a Who Q&A on Monday with some animators who worked on the film. And to my surprise, who were the two animators? None other than David Gallagher and Jason Martinsen, two of my past mentors from Blue Sky! It was awesome to see them in a Q&A again. I’ve had such great mentors throughout AM, it was just great to see them again.

A lot of cool things are happening in the animation world. It’s just one of those times when things are great and I’m enjoying it all.

Oh, and I woke up today to several awesome greetings from AMers for turning a year older today. Drawings, cakes, songs — I love AM.

It’s week 8!

Coming in a bit late on the blogging here but technically it’s still Monday for another 24 minutes. Things are getting busy. Between my film, all the stuff at AM, and just life in general, it’s busy. Having a blast, just busy. So this last week I made some final tweaks and did some reblocking to the final third of my film. Woot!

I also took some time to refine the first and second thirds…all in prep to get splining. So here’s the entire film in it’s blocking plus stage:

So this week I start to spline this baby. It’s been a while since I’ve been at the splining stage so it’s time to jump in. I had a few of those key moments in animation this last week — those instances when you see the character come to life. They were quick, but it was great to see. So I can’t wait to get this baby all splined out and polished and pretty and all that jazz. Gotta see the life in my character. Lots of work to do.

I cannot believe it’s week 7 already.