My latest piece of animation and plans for this weekend

this is my render for bran the Ravens last bit of dialogue in Storytelling of Ravens. This was a lot of fun to work with. I happened to be watching Dispicable Me and Megamind at the time, and was in a really good animation mood. I need to get more of the smoothness in there that pixar and dreamworks get into their characters. Granted they spend a lot more time and have alot more animators to work on each bit. What they would spend months developing and animating over and over again i churn out in less than a week. Partly its attention span, i want to move onto the next thing as soon as possible, and just a lot of back and forth trial and error that can get tiresome. Thats not to say i dont put alot of love and attention into my work, THAT, I DO!
Its just growing a thick skin, and not being distracted, and seeing a project through to the end i am working on.

Anyway, it is hard not to be discouraged when you think what the people you show it to may think, comparing your work to the greats. But really i just do what i am enjoying and thats all. I am comfortable at my level right now, and when i am ready to up my game, I WILL UP MY GAME, I DO NOT NEED TO BE PUSHED DOWN A ROAD OR WEINED OFF ANYTHING.

So anyway, work with the Ravens is going very well.

And we had a fantastic bit of LUCK recently. The Modeler, Daffy whom Sophie and James and Andi were talking to for advice in modeling the raven, recently revealled he is working on a feature film adaptation loosely based on Edgar Alan Poe's life, and featuring a Model Raven Rig. So Sophie managed to acquire this rig. this is fantastic news for Clym as he could use it to help his modeling, and I on the other hand can try animating a walk cycle over the Easter break using this model, as the Model seen in the Lip sync video animation i made is a very limited and ungraceful rig. So this will be great as we are still waiting for our raven model to get done. and the sooner we get it the better.



Recently , I downloaded a big folder, 2 GB worth of videos recorded off of Digital Tutors all to do with character Rigging. I got this to Sophie saying if she wanted to practice rigging over the easter break, these videos are incredibly easy to follow and a great help if you are not that interested in following a book.

I will have a watch of it over the break as well. But this weekend i will test out the raven rig, try doing a walk cycle maybe. But for now , Sophie and I put together our presentation for monday. I don't know if mike is expecting anything specific, we just are going to explain it for the benefit of the second years who maybe have no idea what the third years are up to. So i basically took out our presentation from last decembers formative and updated all the videos and images to where we are currently at with the project.

So hopefully that will go down well. Sophie sais come in for 10 O'clock monday and well ad some new videos she will work on, maybe a new edit of the animatic. i added in images of our schedule, we may or may not go into that, we want to keep it under five minutes if we can.
And finally, my last meeting with Claire Bennett went well on thursday, she gave me the idea to add a pie chart figure to help with my dissertation, fleshing out my contextualizing of how money is distributed when developing a game. So now all i need to do is get my dissertation essay finished and submitted for Friday.