alexiss dawn

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!!!

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!

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

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!

Just a heads up to everyone — Jason Ryan Animation launched today! The tutorials are now available! It’s been a long time coming and a lot of hard work has been put into it. With previews through the ramp up tutorials in the JRA newsletter, I can say right now with full confidence that these are a GREAT resource for any animator to keep learning and growing. I can’t wait to dive in.

A HUGE congrats to Jason on the site launch!

Just wanted to holler out a couple of huge congrats to some friends — to Jeff Weidner for getting a job as an animator at Technicolor Interactive! Started there this week — a huuuuuge accomplishment man and very well deserved. And another huge congrats to John Vielee for recently getting an animation internship at Framestore!! (See! I can spell your last name right!) I absolutely love hearing this stuff happen for you guys. It makes my life great! Congrats!

Just a heads up — a new version of tradigiTOOLS has been released. The update is free for everyone that has already bought a license. Go check it out over on their forums. This new version has several updates including:

• Added support for Blend nodes
• Added support for Character Sets
• Parenting to the Camera is now supported for the shotmask
• WINDOWS ONLY: 64-bit support for Maya64 on XP64 & Vista64
• MAC ONLY: Maya 8.5 and Maya 2008 plug-ins are now Universal Binaries (UB)

I’ve been helping beta test these new versions and things are working very smoothly. And for all you guys that like character sets, well it works with those now. I know a lot of AMers were excited for this. It has some great features so get your update. And if you haven’t checked it out yet, well, what are you waiting for?

Just a heads up that the replay of the webinar with Shawn Kelly (Animation Mentor co-founder, ILM animator, fried chicken enthusiast) is up. I love that they’re allowing it to be replayed — even all of us current AM students are loving seeing it. It’s basically like a lecture that we get at AM each week. Shawn is an amazing person and absolutely hilarious. So go check it out here — it’s only up till April 29th!

I’ve been taking a bit of a new approach in work flow as I’ve been animating my film. I’m spending a lot more time outside of Maya right now as things get fleshed out. I started doing it when we were getting into layout during class 5 and am keeping at it now that we’re into blocking. What? Why?! In the ramp up tutorials Jason Ryan has been doing I’ve been seeing his approach of sketching it out before getting into Maya. I tried for a bit on my tiny wacom but man alive, it just doesn’t translate well to my big monitor. The day I get a Cintiq will be beautiful. But for now, I’ve been doing it all the old school paper way. Yes, my tool of choice is a Sharpie. It’s been great so far for figuring out what I want from the poses and how the motion is going to flow between them. Seriously! I feel a lot more prepared when I get into Maya and I get through it faster than I have before because I go in knowing just what I want.

Back in class 1 we had to do several poses almost every week with Stu. Now more than ever I see the reason for it all. The more you practice posing and just loose sketch, not worrying about how it looks and just going for the motion, the more you start to understand about movement and the body and appeal. Not saying I know a ton, but I’ve come a long way since class 1. The sketches from a year ago…oh man. I’m no 2D artist, but I can totally see how important it is to sketch and explore posing and motion. And it certainly prepares you more to jump in and get those poses in Maya.

Sharpies…available at your local, well, pretty much any store.

And we’re back! Well, I’m back! Just got back from California late last night. Man alive, that trip was fun. It was so beautiful down there. I got to go to Disneyland for a few days — man is that place packed!! Word to the wise: avoid spring break week. We don’t get spring break at AM so I didn’t know! It’s pretty cool how much they’ve put into the different lands though to make you feel like you’re in the wild west or a jungle. The parades and fireworks were great too. But during the nightly fireworks they have Tinkerbell fly around the castle. This person is hanging by wires swinging quickly back and forth around the castle and through fireworks. I swear she was about to slam into the castle. Has to be an exhilarating job every night I’m sure.

I also got to visit Dreamworks Animation in Glendale while I was down there. It’s such a beautiful campus and it was great to get to talk with people. I swear, when you bring so many passionate people together the results are so amazing. It was great to just have lunch and get to talk with some people and get to see the campus for a couple of hours. Many thanks to those who made it possible — I had a lot of fun. I left smiling and completely inspired.

One of the nights I spent in my hotel for my last Q&A. It’s always such a bittersweet moment — spending 12 weeks with these people and having to switch to another class!! We stuck around for a long time just chatting with out mentor about all sorts of animation stuff. It was a jam packed inspiration session that left me pumped for this next term. It really was an incredible class and it was great to have such an awesome last Q&A. “Work to learn, not to earn” and “It’s all about the entertainment” were two of the things we talked about. Ain’t it true.

A few people in the LA area heard I was in town and we ended up getting together for dinner and drinks on Friday as well. It was so great to see these guys and just hang out in good company and talk “shop” and about AM. The energy whenever animators get together is absolutely incredible — perhaps that’s why studios are such amazing places. These people are awesome!!

A great trip and a great way to kick start my final term at Animation Mentor! Now it’s back to work and time to finish up my film!