I need to get better at blogging...I just get so busy, I forget to post on here, but here I am. I'm still alive...I think. The past few weeks have been pretty exciting, as I have started Animation Mentor back up and currently in week 4 of Class 2. This go around, my mentor is Richard Fournier, who is an animator at Blue Sky Studios, and has worked on Ice Age 4: The Continental Drift, Rio, and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, and it's a true honor to be able to learn from him.
The past few weeks, I have been working on my first shot of the term, which is Ballie doing a heel click. I went through the planning process of shooting video reference of myself attempting to click my heels...
Did planning drawings in order to plan the whole animation out on paper before I ever touch the computer...
And this past week I finished my blocking plus pass on my shot...
This week I am finishing up this shot- making final corrections and putting it into spline and going to town on it! Basically, I am smoothing it all out and making it look good. I will post the finished product when I get it finished. I also have to plan out my next assignment this week, so I will be shooting more video reference and doing some more planning drawings, which I will share in my next post.
Yesterday was an exciting day! My girlfriend Jill and I were able to visit Reel FX Creative Studios in Dallas and were given a great tour by Ray Chase, who is a senior animator there as well as a mentor at Animation Mentor. After the tour, we were getting ready to go eat lunch at Monica's with Ray when he started asking the other animators if they wanted to join us and before you knew it, the whole animation team was going to eat lunch with us! That was pretty awesome, and it was great getting to meat them all and talk to them. It was really an amazing experience, and I am going to bust my butt at Animation Mentor over the next year so when I graduate, I can get a job there. I would love to be able to get a job at such an amazing studio, doing what I love, while staying in Texas!
