With home life and work, it’s been hard to find a moment to post anything here.  AM has kicked off and the experience is greater than I could’ve imagined.  I liken it to Facebook, except it’s much more video/web cam driven and everyone on the site is a student of animation!  My Class 1 mentor is Joe Mandia.  He’s currently animating online games for Sony Online entertainment, but his resume includes feature animation at Disney and Sony Imageworks.  Joe is a super cool guy and it’s been great getting to know him.

As for school itself, I’m finishing up week 3.  I actually have homework to finish that’s due tomorrow by 2pm central.  I’ll start posting this work shortly when I find the time to gather the files, but in a nut shell, we’ve been drawing lots of human poses.  This week’s assignment was to pose the CG character, Stu, in a pose that expresses “excitement.”  The idea behind the assignment is to learn our to communicate attitudes through one drawing or pose.

Also, this week we have our first animation assignment: the infamous bouncing ball.  With squashing or stretching the ball’s shape, we have to animate it to bounce like a basketball.  Next week, we take the same CG ball and animate it to bounce like a bowling ball and a ping pong ball.  The question being answered is: What is the difference between these very different balls and how do you animate them to convincingly express the differences?

Fun stuff.  I love it to no end.  I’ll be showing this stuff off very soon.  I will also try to get picks of my new old school animation desk up on this blog later today!  Yes I know, animation used to be made with graphite marks on paper.  Sounds crazy, but is true.

Rio