alexiss dawn

Carlos just put this list up on his blog and all I can say is holy cow! We had 22 Animation Mentor graduates and former students work on Horton Hears A Who!! When I saw it with AMers last Friday we had a lot of fun trying to point out all of the names we knew — it was incredible. People we know! And this isn’t counting all of the amazing mentors. But people that started off just like us at AM. Dang, it’s amazing. It was a great feeling to see all of these names scroll by. Congrats to everyone that worked on it. And a huge congrats and thanks to AM for making it possible for so many of these people to have the ability and chance to do this!

AM graduates:

• Aja Bogdanoff
• David Sloss
• Gordana Fersini
• Jeff Kim
• Miles Southan
• Lluis Llobera
• Shahbaaz Shah
• Max Perelman
• Eric Luhta
• Pete Devlin
• Ken Music

Former AM students:

• Greg Rizzi
• Nathan Engelhardt
• Steve Melagrano
• Ryan Hobbiebruken
• Dan Barker
• Lance Fite
• Anthea Kerou
• Rebecca Perez
• Scott Farrell
• Venece Lyman
• Paul Diaz

It’s been a great week - and for so many reasons! First off, a huge congrats to all of the AMers that got jobs this last week. I cannot even put into words how excited I’ve been as news has popped up each day of yet another and another friend getting a job. A huge congrats especially to Ron (PDI/Dreamworks) and Maciek (Dreamworks). Seriously guys, you’ve earned it! It’s totally made my week to hear your news! There’s no better feeling than seeing my friends’ dreams come true. It’s an incredible sight! Been bouncing in my chair all week in excitement! It just seems like things are going great for people — things falling into place bit by bit and I absolutely love seeing that happen in these guys’ lives. An incredibly exciting process.

Of course Friday was the opening of Blue Sky’s new movie, Horton Hears a Who. I got to go see it with the amazing group of Utah AM animators. Gotta love it. It was a great movie with some interesting quirks. But the animation was stellar and the movie had us laughing at several parts. It was so great to watch the credits and see so many names of friends and people from AM. Man, this stuff is becoming real! Of course dinner and several hours of talking followed the movie. I love those guys.

Also this week my brother came home after living in Peru for the last two years. Crazy stuff to be seeing him. But it’s a lot of fun. He’s just as crazy. And I’ll admit that this week that event took up a lot of my time. Today we had a ton of people over and man was it loud. I totally enjoyed being able to kick back and just play with my niece for several hours though, watching movies and chasing her around. A great day and night off.

Life is good. Film update coming tomorrow!

Animation Mentor just released it’s first ebook today! Each month in the AM newsletter the ever hilarious Shawn, co-founder of AM and animator at ILM, writes up some tips and tricks for animation. It’s seriously chock full each month with so much information. And now, it’s all been compiled into an ebook!! And it’s totally free! So head over here and get your copy now! Seriously, this is animation gold. And you may even run into some fried chicken talk.

Also when you request the free ebook, you’ll have an opportunity to sign up for a Q&A with Shawn in April! C’mon, it can’t get much better than this for you guys. I know there are plenty of you out there that have been thinking about joining AM — I’ve been reading your emails and your comments! Now’s your chance to get a lil more taste of it all!

Carlos, one of the great and hilarious founders of Animation Mentor and Pixar animator, has updated his website! It’s got a really cool new design and a lot of content all over it. AM ninjas Rachel and Michael did a really amazing job working with Carlos to redesign it. From music to animation to artwork to many links and resources — it’s well worth your time to go and check it out. And make sure you check out the fingerboarding videos.

Just a heads up — the eCrit for the January winner of the 11 Second Club, Ryan Daniel, has been posted. Ryan did an awesome job with some great stylized characters. This time around the eCrit is done by the always entertaining Dimos Vrysellas, animator, AM mentor, and creator of TradigiTOOLS. Go check it out!

Also, just sharing in my own excitement, the date for Animation Mentor’s summer graduation has been posted on the member site! It’ll be in August! This time around it’ll be my turn to graduate. Can’t wait! But first thing’s first — back to my film!

It’s been out there for a while and I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before — but it’s still that good. Steve Jobs gave the commencement speech at Stanford in 2005 and it’s a brilliant speech. I have it on my itunes list and whenever it pops up it’s always great to hear. Just so happens it popped up while I’ve been at work today.

Working on my film at AM, a topic of conversation that comes up a lot between many of us is what’s in store for the future. Of course none of us have any idea but what we do know is that we love this stuff — our passion lies in animation and the people involved with it — and the idea of getting to do that in the future as a career is very exciting to us. So many of us over at AM are in jobs that are just helping us to pay the bills and we’re working hard and running at that light to work together in the future.

The entire speech is great — you can read the entire speech text over on Stanford’s news site One of my many favorite quotes:

You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

Work at AM is ramping up. Just getting everything with my story solidified and I think I’ve managed to get it to a point where it works for most people. Funny what a little tweaking will do. In the meantime I’ve been working on a side test to push my mechanics skills. It’s getting there and it’s nice to do something on the side with no restrictions. I’ll be posting something up soon.

Alright, a so a few animation tidbits for all of you —

Issam Zejly, an Animation Mentor alumni from the first graduating class, has completed a new beautiful short film and it’s being featured over at CGSociety. It’s great to see AMers pushing their own work continually and he’s done a wonderful job creating this. (And all in only 2 months!) Congrats to him on a job very well done. Check out the film, Starry Night, here.

The Animation Podcast has been updated this weekend. It features a new interview with the very talented James Baxter. As a supervising animator at Disney and Dreamworks some of the characters he brought to life include Belle, Rafiki, Quasimodo, Moses, and Spirit. On the CG side, he also served as a supervising animator on Shrek 2 and Madagascar. James’ latest work was creating all the animation sequences for Enchanted at his studio, James Baxter Animation. Also, don’t forget that the Animation Podcast is sponsored by Animation Mentor. If you subscribe to their free newsletter you’ll have access to an exclusive podcast later on this year.

Speaking of newsletters, I woke up to a great little tidbit in my inbox — the latest Jason Ryan Animation ramp up newsletter. In case you’ve missed it, the talented Jason Ryan, who has worked at Disney and Dreamworks, is starting up an animation tutorial site. For the last year as he’s been developing the site, he’s been giving us sample tutorials in the newsletters and they’ve a very great resource to have. Animation is all about learning and growing, no matter how long you’ve been doing it. The site should be going live really soon and I think if animation is what you want to do, then this is another great resource for you. So go check out his website, get a little preview, and sign up for the newsletter.

Alright bloggers, I think that’s it for now. So much to discuss and so little time. Keep on animating!

Just an update to my earlier post about the release of tradigiTOOLS — the guys over at FUNhouse Interactive have decided to give all new customers a 10% discount off the license price for tradigiTOOLS from now until the end of February. The discount code is popcorn. It’s already a steal at the current price, so with 10% off, what excuse do you have for not getting it?

Just a quick shout out to all of you animators about a new tool for Maya. It’s the creation of one of our mentors at Animation Mentor, Dimos Vrysellas. I had the chance to be a part of the beta team last year and had the chance to really dig into it and use it while I worked on my dialogue shots. It’s built to help make for a quicker workflow — setting keys and breakdowns quicker, switching between cameras, switching interpolation of tangent types, cleaning up tangents, and an enhanced way to playblast. Go check it out over here. It’s been tested for Windows and Macs and they’ve worked hard to make it a strong and sturdy tool. Check it out!

(A note for all Animation Mentor students — make sure you check out the news bulletin on the AM member site for a bit more news. )

Last week was crazy enough that I didn’t get a good chance to talk about my new class. So like I said, my mentor is Cal Brunker. He’s now over at House of Cool and was at Blue Sky Studios before. He’s a story artist and did the boards for the opening scene in the first Horton Hears A Who trailer. So far I’ve really enjoyed it. He’s very passionate about this stuff and it shows which is great. Our second Q&A this week went really well. After talking for a few about some class things, he gave us the chance to pitch a couple of our short film ideas for the whole class and then opened it for discussion. It was a great way to get some feedback in real time and go back and forth. It’s really amazing how someone can say something and although you hadn’t ever thought of it before, it makes total sense.

A big thing Cal stressed this last Q&A was that we need to have a visible objective from the beginning of our stories. I hadn’t strongly tied that into my ideas before so it’s been a week of rewriting so far which is excellent. This term will be a bit different as far as this blog goes. I won’t have animation updates every Monday because this term is focused solely on story. Right now we’re developing the story, then we’ll board and do our animatics, and the last part of the term is layout. I really like that AM has it setup that we focus so much on developing the story. After all, can’t have a great film without a great story.

I’m really looking forward to this project though. I feel like this is going to be a good push in what I can do as an animator so far. I’m still a noob by far — only been doing this a year. But I’m happy with the progress I’ve been able to make and can’t wait to push it even farther. I’ve got a feeling this year is going to be one of the hardest, most interesting and most challenging, and yet most rewarding years. Being able to progress and be surrounded by great people is a great blessing.

Oh, make sure you go check out Bobby’s blog post about grad. He’s posted some great pics as well as an email he got from an animator in the industry that was able to come to grad. It’s really inspiring to read.

The new eCritique for the December competition over at the 11 Second Club is up — make sure you guys check it out. Gives you a good look at what we get at Animation Mentor and also is just chock full of animation gold. The awesome Mark Behm who’s at PDI/Dreamworks does the eCritique this month - excellent stuff!