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So... Another week at the ol' AM *grin*
It was a fabulous week!...
On Monday I was able to attend a Welcoming Q&A hosted by none other than Shawn Kelly himself... Saaaaweeeeet!!!!!
A really nice guy... I mean, really nice! The event was supposed to last an hour and a half... but instead he stuck around for a whole lot longer... like an hour or more longer. In the Q&A 'rooms' there is an area to send chat messages out to the rest of the group... the room was so filled with folks, excited... and typing away... it was like a speed reading session just trying to keep up with what everyone was saying.... That was until Shawn stepped into the room :D It was a fun session, being able to ask him industry questions, and questions on how he animates, and of course... questions on Fried Chicken;)
You can check out some great regular tips from Shawn Kelly in the AM monthly newsletter... to subscribe just check out the AM site... www.animationmentor.com .... and join in on receiving their newsletter... it's in the lower left hand corner on their main page... just remember to allow cookies or else it won't 'take'
Also... don't forget to check out 11secondclub.com for the monthly sponsored AM critique... this month it features Mark Behm :D of PDI/Dreamworks!

By Tuesday evening I sat in on the Techy Q&A hosted by Kevin Freeman, it's a weekly Q&A held in the event that students have technical questions about any of the projects that they are working on... Kevin seems like one really smart guy... currently he works as a Sr. Technical Animator for Sony Pictures Imageworks... very cool!


So our first assignment of the week was to put 'Stu' into a pose. We were to go out into the public realm and draw folks just hanging out, or whatever. I hit up a coffee shop, bookstore, and karate place. I felt a little like a stalker... but I managed to get a few decent poses. I decided to do one from the coffee house. Actually I started doing one pose, then I changed my mind on it after I had gotten some feedback... after I had already been posing Stu.... so I spent a lot of time posing Stu this week... All in all it was a good thing.... I feel much more comfortable with his controllers... and I think that the more posing I do... all the better. But for this week.... I've posted some sketches for my poses up early... so I'll hopefully make a final decision on 1 pose... and stick with it... no being shy about posting sketches this time around! I won't have the time to put Stu in more than one pose this week... cause we've got a basketball to animate ;)
So here is the final Stu pose that I did turn in :D


I do want to say a note of Thanks... if it hadn't been for the wonderful, Awesome community at AM... I never would have pulled off such a nice pose... everyone was so helpful in giving me feedback and advice... what can I say, but.... Y'ALL ROCK! :D Thanks for all of your time, and help... I really, really appreciate it!

My First Week... on the 'inside'

I have finally made it!!! I am on the 'inside' *grin*

I didn't, obviously, post over the holiday season... it was hectic like most folks... and there was an issue that I needed to figure out before AM began as well.

I really didn't expect to have so much difficulty in this area, but I ended up having problems with the Web camera. I ended up buying a total of 3 before I found one that worked with my system... As they say... the 3rd one's charmed *grin* Basically it was an issue with the hardware and addressing... a hard issue to fix with parameters on your puter... it's better just to try a new camera and cross your fingers *grin* A Microsoft web cam was the one that worked for me, after having tried the AM suggested Logitech Pro, and a Creative Labs (same brand as my sound card).

AM contacted us newbie's back in December to invite us to take a brief and somewhat limited look around campus to watch some orientation videos and to have us set up our profiles. There were quite a few videos to watch. All about the exciting features that we had waiting on us to log into the campus for the first time on January 7th, 2008!

So I've dug in hard this past week. Trying to spend time clicking on every little button... seeing where it would take me *grin*

There are areas called workspaces, classrooms, forums, and training...and each of these areas are broken down into even more path choices.

Basically every student and every mentor has there own space.

Videos are posted into the space by users in order to share work that's been done for that week(whether it's animations done by a student, or critiquing of students assignments done by a mentor)... College mates (I say college instead of class... because I mean the entire school) come by your space and leave you some comments, and suggestions for your work.... and you in turn go around to some other spaces and leave comments on their work... No, of course you don't go around to every single person's site(AM is getting too big for that;)... but you try and get to as many as you can. Reciprocations go a long way ;)

There are forums that exist for you to check out... they are used for sending out comments to the community as a whole. You just start up a thread, or join into one... much similar to the way that other popular forums work... and you can also communicate to multiple folks at one time through the use of chat rooms that have been set up for just that purpose.
You can also chat singularly to fellow AMers and you can have instant chat sessions as well. You can organize the college-mates that you most frequently speak with in your "Buddies" section... similar to using other chat programs like Skype.

There's tons of video to watch to help with your training... ranging from the assignment of the week... to training on maya.... tips on animating.... guest speakers... just a plethora of stuff!!! And later on this quarter... students will have the option to sign up for even more training on Maya (which I plan to do... even though I am pretty familiar with Maya already, there have been too many nuggets of gold in the video's that I've already watched to pass up the prospect for more!!!)

And who is my own personal mentor you ask?

... Steve Cady...

Steve Cady is a french-canadian born in Montreal, Canada. He is a 1997 graduate from Sheridan College's Classical Animation programme. For the past 11 years, Steve has worked for numerous studios across north america from gaming to films. His most recent film projects have been Scooby2, Ring2 and The Chronicles of Narnia at Rhythm & Hues.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1513513/

So I've had my first class already and it was great. From Steve's own admission, and from the buzz around campus... he's not the type of Professor that will tell you 'yeah, that looks great... nice try, blah, blah, blah'... but instead he's going to be pushing to give good critique's and in turn really pushing students to dig deep to make their work stand out and develop into something amazing! That sounds awesome to me... the more details that I can get on a crit, the more things I can fix or add to my work... all the better *grin*

So, I leave you now... I will be trying to blog weekly, each Sunday I suspect. But we'll see how that goes... I've seen a lot of Bloggers go down because of the 'crunch'... I'm sure that no matter what though... at the very least... you'll see me post my progress at the end of each class.

Till next Post... Cheers!

~Net