AHHH. A late, LATE update!!

GAHH. CRAP. I haven't updated in forever.

Well, second semester is in full swing which means there's lots of work to go around. It's film season people! Everyone's working hard on their films, busy boarding, thumbnailing and animating. First year films have to be under 90 seconds long, and I'm personally having tons of trouble fitting my film under that limit. I'll probably just make my 2 minute target film and cut the fat out to 90 seconds once all is said and done.

Anyway, a quick recap of the semester so far. A LOT OF AWESOME CRAP HAPPENED.

To start the year off with a bang, we had a 2-week, 4 part lecture from James Baxter himself animating a scene using Giselle and a rabbit from Enchanted. It was really informative and interesting to see a professional's workflow in animating a feature-quality scene.

Amazing animator! Thanks for the lecture!

The director of Kung-Fu Panda, Mark Osborne dropped by for a lecture too, and let a lot of insight into his experemental background and approach to directing KFP.

Thank you for making an awesome Dreamworks movie.

We also had the awesome, awesome Shane Prigmore and Shannon Tindle give a 2-week lecture on character design and their work on Coraline. What's even better is that they assigned us to make character designs based on Oliver Twist characters. Shane's awesome work.

Shannon's awesome work.

They came in and reviewed EVERY SINGLE DESIGN late into the night. It's not enough that these guys are crazy talented, but they're even nicer too! I'll take this chance to plug Coraline. Seriously, go see it. CORALINE. GO SEE IT. My horrible work. This is my take on Oliver.

John Khars and Clay Caytis from the animation podcast came down from Disney to give critiques on any animation we had, along with some people from Pixar. Needless to say I learned a ton from both my critiques and thier insight from others too. For my animation they pointed out that I need to act out my scenes, and note how body parts move in motion. And they're totally right! I usually animate without acting out anything before hand, but I'm slowly trying to researh motion and acting into my animation. AHHHG~ I LOVE ANIMATING. Ahem. John Khars is also coming down this week for a lecture too, exciting!

Dan Holland from Pixar came by this year to talk about character design too. If you've stuck around my blog for a bit, I wrote about Dan Holland coming last year too when I came to visit Calarts. It's freaking crazy that a year ago I visited and was totally blown away by the students, the 48-Lockdown and a Pixar lecture. A year later, here I am making a first year film. Damn awesome. But hard ass work.

Anyway, I'm really happy about the support we're getting from Disney animators coming down to critique our stuff and help us improve. Shane and Shannon may also return during Film crunch time and lend a hand.

My own film is onto the animation stage with some partially completed scenes. I'd say I'm about 30% done though, so there's still shit tons to do. But I'm having so much fun with this film, with my main character Leonardo, learning how to animate quadrapeds, painting the backgrounds... it's freaking fun. I just hope I can finish it, heh. Anyway, I'll post again with more details on my film. And maybe some partially complete footage too. For now, Here's one of the many watercolor backgrounds for my film I'm doing. More to come! Hopefully.