Keep Truckin' Kid

IT has begun. After a long hiatus, I am finally back to AnimationMentor.com to finish my last class and complete my short film "First Date". What's great about this last quarter is that I just found out who my mentor is and I am extremely happy with the outcome. I'm lucky enough to have Ethan Hurd to guide me during the animation stage of my short. I love the work coming out of Sony Imageworks (especially Surf's Up) and Ethan was an animator on that along with a bunch of huge titles at Dreamworks and Pixar. I plan to pick his brain as much as possible and get the most out of my last quarter at AM.

Now that all sounds great, but sometimes things don't come easy. This first week is one of those "sometimes". It all began with Simon. As you may or may not know, I decided to create my own character (Simon) instead of using AnimationMentor's characters for my short. I knew this was a risky move, but I wanted my short to be completely my own content. The AM characters are great, but they aren't mine. If I am serious about making films one day, I need to keep true to my vision. So how did things go wrong? Well, this past Sunday was my own deadline for having my character rigged and ready to animate. Caius (see link on right) and I were cutting close but we on schedule. I started to create a temporary rig for Simon when I quickly realized that the proportions I had created for him were wrong! That meant having Caius rework the model and get it back to me...which also meant i was starting on day 1 behind schedule. Tuesday came around and I still had no idea what to do. I was ready to give up on Simon and use the AM character instead. I didn't want to risk making a bad impression in my first week by not being up to speed. So I called Caius and told him to forget the model. It was going to be too complicated to finish and be able to animate a portion of my short by Sunday. I was really bummed out, but Caius was really persistent and truly felt that he could have the corrections for me the next morning. He felt we could do it. Its Wednesday morning and sure enough Caius comes through strong and makes the necessary changes. I get to rigging right away and I am happy to say Simon LIVES! He's ready to go! I may have lost a couple of days of animating, but I am more driven than ever about getting this done. First thing tomorrow morning....ANIMATION TIME! Hopefully you will see the final version of Simon soon. Caius is making some minor adjustments to him, but nothing that preventing from rigging a proxy.

It has been a stressful couple of days, but it was worth it! Like my dad always tells me "Keep truckin' kid!"