Blogs of note

Just want to point out a few blogs. I found out about the blog illustrated above thanks to referral clicks registered at sitemeter. A character animator located in Savannah, GA named John Paul Rhinemiller has started a very nice blog for animators who are interested in valuable resources. I've already found some interesting links that are new to me. Anyone who knows me knows that I am the collector of links to online resources. He has very nicely pointed me in the right direction regarding his blog which I unfortunately credited to someone else by mistake. So, thanks JP. 

After I responded to JP's recent request for animated shorts worth knowing about he was nice enough to post Sean Coleman's Scratch, Sean's portfolio website, and Sean's blog. Sean graduated from The Art Center Design College, where I teach and chair the Animation Department at our Tucson, AZ campus. He participated in FJORG! 2008 on a team with two animators from Animation Mentor, sharing a second place position with one other team. These days Sean animates for Insomniac Games in Burbank, CA. Sean's film Scratch has made the festival circuit winning awards including a Gold ADDY award for Student Best of Show here in Tucson and has moved on to the regional ADDY Awards with the collaborative Siggy intro completed with Mike Munoz and Brad Wright.

Mike Munoz is another recent graduate from The Art Center and is an extremely multi-faceted artist with numerous strengths. He has been working at a modeler for a colleague of mine named Gav Gnatovich, who teaches here at The Art Center. In addition to his 3D modeling abilities Mike is an highly skilled character setup artist. He came to The Art Center with an engineering background, developed a strong art and animation portfolio, and then fused the two areas of art and engineering together. Since graduation Mike created a very sophisticated and almost entirely automated character setup toolkit for Maya using Python. Check out Mike's blog to get a hint of the number and quality of tools he has created so far.

Brad Wright worked with Sean and Mike on the animated Siggy intro we currently use for The Art Center's animation demo reel. Brad has focused his portfolio on organic modeling while continuing to develop his Character Animation skills in 2D and 3D. He is still taking classes but already has professional modeling and animation work to his credit.

Last but not least is the Art Center Animation Club blog just created by Auston Kleczka and Eva Alcazar, two animation students here in Tucson who have taken the reigns of this club and seem to have a very clear and positive goal of creating a community of animators supporting other animators... not unlike what JP Rhinemiller is doing. I think this completes a nice circle for this post.

More Life Drawing

About one year ago my busy life got a lot busier. In between then and now I wrote two parts of an intended 5 part tutorial on walk cycles which became quite popular at this site, got promoted to the lead position in my department, and held down my old job while simultaneously working my new job.

I am not about to claim that all of this has all been accomplished in top form. I will claim that I am still standing.

Something that I have managed to do is continue with life drawing studies thanks to the Fine Arts department at my school.

5-Minute Walk Cycle

Behold the power of the black Sharpie marker.

I needed to demo capturing into Flipbook for a student yesterday. It was an opportunity to show how fast and easy Flipbook is at timing out your work. One problem, I didn't have any hand drawn animation with me, and worse, no punched paper.

So, in about one minute, I improvised an alternative registration system and five minutes after that I had a sequence of drawings created with a black, fine point Sharpie on scrap paper. I think that's the shortest amount of time I've ever used to create a walk cycle.

-e

Perception is Reality

Joshua Tree California © Rick Chapman 1999.

I would like to quote an author named Robin Williams, (no not that famous actor and comedian, but a woman living in Santa Fe, NM who happens to share the same name).

-- quote --

The Joshua Tree Epiphany
by Robin Williams

Once upon a time, Robin received a tree identifying book where you could match a tree up with its name by looking at its picture. Robin decided to go out and identify the trees in the neighborhood. Before she went out, she read through part of the book.The first tree in the book was the Joshua tree because it only took two clues to identify it.

Now the Joshua tree is a really weird-looking tree and she looked at that picture and said to herself, "Oh, we don’t have that kind of tree in Northern California. That is a weird-looking tree. I would know if I saw that tree, and I’ve never seen one before."

So she took the book and went outside. Her parents lived in a cul-de-sac of six homes. Four of those homes had Joshua trees in the front yard. She had lived in that house for thirteen years, and she had never seen a Joshua tree.

She took a walk around the block - at least 80 percent of the homes had Joshua trees in the front yards. And she had sworn she had never seen one before!

The moral of the story? Once Robin was conscious of the tree, once she could name it, she saw could see it everywhere. Which is exactly my point. Once you can name something, you’re conscious of it. You have power over it. You own it. You’re in control.

-- end quote ---

So, why am I including this quote from graphic design and typography author Robin Williams? Because her little story about suddenly discovering the joshua trees in her neighborhood as a young girl is relevant to anyone learning something new about the world that has already been seen, and lived in, for one's entire life.

All artists have to rediscover what seems like the obvious, and each one of us has our own approach. No one way is THE right way.

-e

Quick Pencil Test

Just playing around with various 2D capture setups at home. I decided to animate something, and unlike what I have been preaching for a while, I decided to just improvise and see what came up.














A little improvised waiting sequence with change of focus at the end.

I have a little reversal here. I'm playing with how to keep a simple pose alive while making sure that the small repetitive head scratch has a little texture.

I know its only a quick, rough pencil test but boy do I need to get back into life drawing sessions.

-e