Animation Mentor Newsletter

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Here are the past "Tips & Tricks" by Shawn Kelly:

- Tip #21: Reversals
- Rise above the snobbery
- Blink for a reason
- Style first!

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Student Example

Hey class,

go check out the "Fried Chicken Cutlet" blog and play the Pixar 1 reel. All his clips on the site are good, but the guy getting out of his chair in the Pixar 1 reel stood out for me. The complexity of it is nice, it's not too cartoony and not too simple.

And his balls look nice too. :)

Since most of you are graduating very soon, I'm sure you got some ball assignments somewhere. If not, it shouldn't take you longer than 20mins. Let's see them so you can move on!

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Class recap

Hey guys (and girls!),

I hope you had a good time yesterday, I know I did. Everybody seems to be motivated to animate the crap out of this semester, good times! :)

There were still a few students that didn't show up, so if you have friends that are among them, please let them know about the new classroom and this site, so they can get up to speed and know what needs to be done homework wise.

Speaking of which:

- read through all the posts on this site (the ones that look helpful at least, like tutorials, lectures, Splinedoctor synopsis - I'd recommend critiques as well)

- check out www.11secondclub.com and go through all the entries. Grab a drink, put on some music and make yourself comfortable, it will take you a while. But like I said, it's good to see what's out there and you'll get to see all the overused and cliched acting choices as well as the more polished and subtle ones.

- look for a web hosting service and get your site up and running. Since you are graduating you NEED an online portfolio.

- use rigs that you can modify so that they look unique. Stay away from Generi, PackageMan and those guys. I recommend Lowman, but especially Norman. Check out Simon Christen's site and go through his links site. Check out all the animators and go through each animator's link page as well and so on. Again, take a few hours on the week-end check out all the amazing stuff. It's great to see how you can create unique characters and make your clip stand out.

- please show me a light, medium and heavy bouncing ball. If you have clips like that from another class, show me those. I just need to see that you mastered the basics and that you are able to show weight. Don't wait til next week if you have them already, shoot me an email and move on.

- please use a frame counter in your clip, keep the codec simple (sorenson 3 or something like that), quicktime (not windows media), movie size big enough so I can see what's going on but don't exaggerate, try to keep the file size small when you send me the movies per email (a direct link to the movie would be great, because on day I'll run out of space)

- if you don't want to follow the school syllabus and do your own thing, go ahead. If you have an idea of what type of clips you want to do and how many, you can always send me an email with that outline and I'll take a look at it.

- everybody please send me an email anyway, so that I have all of them on file (for mass emails in case of class updates). If you have a picture of yourself, attach that too, so that I can start remembering who you are (take a picture of your ID or some head shot). :)

I think that's it. If I remember something I'll add it here, if you have questions don't hesitate and send me an email.

Tata
Jean-Denis

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Advice for Students - by Mark Kennedy

If you haven't done so already, you should check out the "Temple of the seven golden camels" by Mark Kennedy. It's a great blog full of great posts. The newest one is about short films. Go read it!

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"Stick Figure Fundamentals" by Keith Lango

There is an interesting post over at Keith Lango's site, about posing your character and how drawing fundamentals can help you with it.

I don't know if I agree completely. Yes, drawing will help you with your poses, but if you don't know posing, composition, all these principles, then your drawing will still suck. But if you've studied these principles, then you can recognize what's wrong with bad poses. There is no need to draw them out. You can go ahead and fix it on your 3D model.

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