My First Animation Mentor Class Is Over!

After 12 weeks of watching lectures, sketching poses, animating various rigs, and attending Q&A sessions, I am finally done with the first class of Animation Mentor. It's been a fun and challenging quarter and I've learned quite a lot.

Most of it has been about internalizing the basic foundations of animation so that they're second nature to me and developing a more critical eye for animation. During much of the class, I've also worked on improving my workflow so that I'm used to planning, the tediousness of animation, and receiving feedback.

And of course, there's Maya--undoubtedly, the most complex program I've ever used in my life. Don't get me wrong; I have much respect for the program because it's very powerful. However, coming from a usability standpoint, I think it's unnecessarily complicated. I understand the importance that flexibility plays in its design but sometimes it's smarter to simplify for the sake of improved usability and speed. Though Maya is great for animation, I much prefer Luxology modo for modeling, texturing, and rendering.

Anyway, the software is just a tool, right? Back to the topic of Animation Mentor. Hyrum Osmond was a great mentor this quarter. He gave us a lot of great insights into not just animation in general but what it's like working for Disney. He recently finished work on Tangled so he was able to share about the struggles and victories of that project. This is one of the greatest things about Animation Mentor. It's rare that you get opportunities to have someone really mentor you but you really get that. Sure, it's not in-person and you're in the context of a classroom, but you get individualized attention every week. I can say that it's on-par, if not better than the attention I received at USC's School of Cinematic Arts.

A Few Key Animation Pointers

Here are just a few key pointers I took away from this quarter's class:

1. Posing the character so that it has a clear silhouette is important. Imagine if you only saw the character's silhouette. You should still be able to tell what's going on.
2. Exaggeration is key to creating interesting animation. I think I was too "natural" in the beginning so my animation didn't look very lively.
3. Planning is a necessary step that shouldn't be overlooked! I suck at drawing but I've definitely improved over the past three months as I've been drawing sketches during the planning phase every week. It definitely saves time to sketch first, then pose the model.
4. Avoid cliche poses or acting choices. This is what separates the good from the bad animation.

There's so much more I learned, including the intangible experience factor, but those are things I will be constantly reminding myself.

Progress Reel

And finally, here's my progress reel for this term. It shows all the assignments I did, starting with the most recent.