Happy Holidays!

Well, it's been 3 months since I've updated any assignments, or posted new art. Mostly because I took a term off from Animation Mentor, and started my new job! I got hired on as a freelance artist for a company called FilmScape Productions. My title is Animator, Cinematographer, and Editor. So I basically get to do it all! Animate, film, and edit, all the things I've been growing up doing! I just got back from a shoot in New York City, which was an amazing adventure. I got to shoot for a company called Monster Media, and they were hired on by Cannon cameras for events on the street all week. It was such a cool opportunity to be able to travel for my job. Although my title is animator, I've mostly been editing for all this time. I'll be posting an editing reel on my website soon, so be on the look out for that!

I am so pumped to start Animation Mentor again in a few weeks. I will be on class four, which is introduction to acting. It's going to be pretty different from all my mechanics classes, and a lot of work. But my mentor for this class is named David Tart and he used to work for Pixar! You can see his imdb here http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0850716/ I'm sad to say I didn't get around to fixing most of my animations in these past few months while taking a break. I've been focusing on learning After Effects, and more about cameras for work. Which put a huge set back in brushing up my 3d skills. But at least I've been doing some 2d motion graphics stuff with work! But I also found out that I get to go on a trip to San Francisco next April. So hopefully my new mentor knows a person there that can give me a tour of Pixar. That would be my life dream. Just to even enter their campus. Fingers crossed!!

Since I've already talked so much about myself which is highly unordinary, and it's just me killing time avoiding fixing up my resume, here's the most recent art that I've done lately! This took me a good few months to paint. One of hte biggest projects I've done yet. My boyfriend wanted me to make him a personalized cooler, because all of his friends got some made for them. I volunteered for it not having a clue how much work it would be. You first had to sand down the entire thing, just to get the paint to stick. Then I primed it all with spray paint, painted each and every side of the cooler (2 months for that job alone because I'm such a perfectionist) and then seal it all with mod podge and more sealant spray. Holy cow was it rough. But I finally got it done! Each side has to do with sports, and his favorite Florida teams. He has a lot of them clearly. I could totally start a business with these coolers haha.

I wish you all some happy holidays! And I'll be back soon with more Animation Mentor assignments!

Final Assignment!

It's the last week!!! I made it through class 3!! Now it's time for a break, render out my shots, sit down with a glass of wine, and do nothing but apply to jobs until my next class starts in January. It's amazing that I pushed through this class while working so many hours on Tough Enough. I pulled a good 4 different all nighters on numerous saturdays, and I think the only thing that got me through it was taking it one day at a time. When I looked at the big picture and saw all that I had to do still, that's when I got stressed out. So I decided to worry about the now, and plan to work on my shots every day when I got home. Even though that happened probably only twice, I got through it and didn't fail! Below is my most recent submission. It's another pass at the sword fight.

But I'll be back soon to post my final reel! We have to have all of our corrections and fixes done by Friday. I already got one rendered, so let's see how far I can get done by then!

Sword Fight

Almost done! I'm on week 11 out of 12! We're so close to finishing this term, and then it's time for a break for me. I'm not going to start my acting class until January, so I'll be perfecting all of my previous shots until then to add to my portfolio. Here is my newest assignment, a sword fight! Sticking with the pirate theme, this imp is playing with a sword, and then loses it. 

Pirates Under Attack

Here's my latest version of Stewart on a pirate ship that's under attack!

Under Attack Blocking

For our most recent assignment, I started out blocking on my newest shot. I stuck with the pirate theme, and this is what happens after the imp throws the cannon ball over board. I have Stewart sleeping below deck, the ship rocks from the attack, and he awakes freaking out, running over to the cannon, and pushing it out the window preparing for attack. What he doesn't realize is how heavy it is, and how slippery the floor is, so it takes him a bit to actually get his goal accomplished.

Because I worked 60 hours for the show reality Tough Enough this week, I ended up having to pull another all nighter in order to just get this shot done. But as I was working through the night, I think I finally had that aha moment while animating. My last mentor would always talk in class about how people don't get animation right away. Some people get it within a month, and others take years to finally have that aha moment, where they finally realize what they're doing. It's no longer a rotate this and translate that, it's not a shoulder leads the forearm which leads the wrist. But it's more of a creative outlet where the finger could end up being the joint that drives the entire body. It's very enlightening once you have that moment. And this moment is probably the smallest base of the giant uphill realization that is yet to come. But all in all, here is my shot!

Final Shot!

This past week was our last time to turn in our first shot for class 3! I'm still going to go back and revise it even more based on my mentors most recent critique, but we have to move on for now. I'm excited to start this second shot because I feel like I have such a better foundation in blocking now, that it's getting easier and easier to comprehend all of the principles of animation. From everything moving in arcs to squash and stretch, I finally feel that I am actually aware of it all while working out my shot. But for now, this is how my first cannon ball attack turned out!

Cannon Ball!

This next assignment was to spline out our shot. Our mentor told us if we end up not hyaving too much time, we could perfectly spline out half of our shot. I ended up spending way too much time on the lift, and only really got the second half of my shot splined out. This is how it looks so far!

We also had to start planning for our next shot. Below is my thumbnailing for it. I had to keep within the pirate theme, so for this guy, I used another imp and did another reaction shot. This imp is sleeping below deck, and reacts to the shake of incoming cannon balls hitting the ship. He then runs to the cannon and pushes them out the window preparing to take aim. I wanted to add a lot of slide in there that is seen in my reference videos. Here's the drawings for it!

Cannon ball blocking

I started my advanced body mechanics class! We have to pick a theme for the entire term, and have either all of our shots relate to that theme, or make a continuous flow of them. For my assignment, I chose the pirate theme! My first assignment is using one of the imps that animation mentor provides to us. The idea of this one is, to have Pinky completely relaxed and hanging out, because he just pillaged all this gold, and now he's heading home from the hard days work. Out of nowhere, a cannon ball bounces onto the deck, scaring him. He runs over to pick up the ball, and throws it overboard. The whole point of this shot, is to explore weight. I figured I didn't really get that concept very well last term, so I thought I should work on it some more this term. Plus it makes for a fun theme and story. I already can't wait to start planning my next one out. But this pass below is my second blocking pass for the shot.

New Editing Job!

I've been completely m.i.a. for a few weeks now. I got a summer job at the company that I interned at, called IDEAS. I'm the new assistant editor, and I'm working on a reality television show, that's being filmed out of Orlando and Full Sail. It's called WWE Tough Enough on the USA Network. There are contestants who compete in challenges, and every Tuesday night at 8:00, America votes for who should stay on to become WWE's next big wrestler. Basically, its like American Idol, but for tough people. I'm doing 50+ hours a week, so it's pretty hard with animation mentor right now and getting my reel completed. Coffee is really the only thing that's keeping me afloat...for now. But check out our show on Tuesday nights at 8:00 pm on USA! There's no credits, because there's too many people who worked on it, otherwise I'd be taking pictures of that!

But more importantly...2 weeks down and 8 to go!!!!

Chicago

So I was in Chicago this past week, visiting my best friend that moved up there. I would post my assignment, but it's pretty rough, since I didn't get much time to work on it. Here's some photography I took instead! This is much more pleasant to look at =] I went up there with my boyfriend to watch Orlando City play, and we also got to go to the Art Institute of Chicago. It was gorgeous, and there were so many paintings there, it could have taken us the entire day to see everything. It was a very pleasant surprise! Especially because they had some of my favorites, I was in heaven.

Test Your Strength

I had to submit a revised blocking pass for last week, based on my mentors notes. This is how it came out! It feels a lot better from the first one in terms of weight. Slowly but surely, I'll get there!

Strength Blocking

This week, our assignment was to take our planning, and block it out in our shot. My mentor told me to do a different idea, because flags aren't really that heavy. So instead, I took the same idea, and applied it to the carnival game, where you can test your strength. I am using Stan, who is this big ole guy, and he's pretty hard to work with, because his proportions are so crazy. I can't really get his arms over his head very much. I also later on, want to add a ball that goes up when he hits the pad, and it's not going to go very far at all, to give it a little humor. But this is what I have so far!

Final Walk!

We had to finish up our sloan walk this week based on our critiques. Below is my video for what I submitted.

We also had to do planning for our next assignment. For our next project, it's going to take up the entire rest of the semester. We got a list of things to chose from that we could animate. I chose to do lifting a heavy object. I had an idea for a story, and wanted to apply my heavy object to that. My story goes, Stan is climbing up a mountain, makes it to the top, and claims it with a really big and heavy flag. I planned it all out using an animatic in photoshop, and you can see what I did for it below. I can't wait to start blocking out this guy!

Palm Oil Action Team

So I just recently got an email from someone on Etsy who is a member of the Palm Oil Action Team, asking if I wanted to donate my mini rhino painting. I have never even heard of the Palm Oil problem that's been going on. Apparently, people are chopping down the rainforest to plant farms of palm trees. Palm oil is a type of edible vegetable oil that is derived from the palm fruit, grown on the African oil palm tree. According to the World Wildlife Fund, an area the equivalent size of 300 football fields of rainforest is cleared each hour to make way for palm oil production. This large-scale deforestation is pushing many species to extinction, and findings show that if nothing changes species like the orangutan could become extinct in the wild within the next 5-10 years, and Sumatran tigers less than 3 years. Over 90% of orangutan habitat has been destroyed in the last 20 years, and over 50,000 orangutans have already died as a result of deforestation due to palm oil in the last two decades. 

The woman who wrote me, is the founder of the Boston Branch of the Palm Oil Action Team. They are paired with the Rainforest Action Network, and they are hosting a palm oil awareness day to educate people. It's going to be a big event, and they wanted to work with me to have my painting as one of the prizes for the wheel of fortune. The Sumatran Rhinos are being driven out to extinction because of this problem, and the mini painting I am donating is my rhino I made.

It's very eye opening to learn about different problems that are happening in other countries, that most people are completely unaware of.  To learn more about the palm oil problem, you can view this website here-  

http://www.saynotopalmoil.com/Whats_the_issue.php

Dog walk splined!

I got my dog walked splined out for this week! Splined is an animation term for smoothed out. So now all of his poses are flowing and continuous. This is how he turned out.

This week we also have our last poses forever. I'm secretly kind of excited that we don't have to do poses again, so I can just focus on getting my animations down. We had to show dogs playing. It was a little tough getting the right movement in there, a lot of playing poses were pretty generic and either running or jumping to each other. These are my sketches for the pose.

I decided to go with a tug of war idea between 2 dogs. I haven't seen much online in terms of dogs playing with each other, using toys. I really liked the humor behind the one that I circled however, I couldn't get the character to scale down into the puppy sized dog. So I ended up turning in what I have below. This also shows more of a weight shift in the dog to the left.

I got Sloan made into a puppy! Here's my rendered result based on my mentors critique.

Dog Blocking

This past week, we had to create a blocking pass of our dog walk. It was pretty fun, a lot more fun to me than working on Stella walking. This is what I turned in for my blocking. 

I got a lot of great feedback. I was told to take out all of the personality of the stopping and head turn though, and keep it as a vanilla cycle. So it's going to look a lot different once I spline it out. We also had to do 2 more poses of Sloan showing movement. These are my sketches for it. I was trying to go with something different, like a lot of climbing and jumping down off of things. 

and here are the circled poses that I submitted

My rendered result changed up a lot. I wanted the one to look like he's starting to step down from the chair, but it really didn't come across as what I had intended. I ended up having him climbing down the stairs, so it's more apparent what he's doing, and the he's actually in motion.

Quadruped Study

We get to animate dogs!!!!! I'm so excited to move onto something that's not human! (Mostly because I've only animated 2 humans ever, and the second one was last week) So for this week, we had to start out planning our walk cycle. We had to take video reference of a dog, so I took tons of footage on my boyfriends boxer. She's a little weird and her proportions aren't normal, so we'll see if this actually turns out right. But below is the video I took of her. I tried to get a side and front view. And in the last shot, is where her personality comes out a lot, so I am thinking that I want to incorporate that into the end of my walk.

And below is the planning I created using the Animators Survival Kit. That doesn't include the end head look, so I'll have to revise it a little.

We also had to sketch out quadruped animals this week, and take 2 of our drawings into maya and then pose them out. I tried to look at wild animals to avoid the regular dog cliche. I searched foxes when they hunt, because they do this crazy pounce and leap thing, and they're very animated creatures. I also looked at wolf puppies playing, coyotes, etc. So I definitely got a lot more variety in my poses compared to the average dog. I stuck with dogs for this week, but for our study next week, I'm going to add in a variety of animals.

And now here are how the poses turned out that I submitted. I already got some great feedback, and will be fixing and rendering them soon!

And now after completing all of my changes, this is the final render!

Peter Pan Art

I made quote art! I always see such cool art paired with quotes on pinterest, and there was nothing appealing associated with this quote. It's by far one of my favorites, and I've always felt like I could relate to Peter Pan...growing up wise. Especially in my industry, making animated cartoons for a living. Dreaming is also my escape. I can remember at least 3 dreams a night, and they're so imaginative and out of this world, there's no possible way I could explain them to people without drawing them out for them to understand. Even then, they're so detailed and not normal, it would look like Dali if I could actually do it correctly. Plus sometimes I lucid dream, which is a topic that I could write an entire novel off of. So for now, I'll stick with Peter Pan art!

Stella Walk

This week, we had to spline out our walks, which is basically smoothing it out. Mine still needs a lot of work, but this is what I ended up turning in for it.

We also had to do some more poses with Stella showing movement. I'm not really sure if there's a difference between movement, and last weeks motion poses, but I have a lot less sports reference in this one. These are my sketches for the poses. I was trying to get a lot more dynamic ideas in there that clearly show the line of action.

And now this is what I animated. There's a very big difference in the pose on the left. I originally had her just beginning to touch the ground mid run, and leaning back trying to avoid the other one coming at her, like how it is in the drawing. But everyone thought she should be keeled over instead coming into more of a protective pose. 

And now here is my final render with all of the fixes I made.

Full Body Walk

For this second week, we had to make a full body walk using Stella, a new character. We had to shoot reference video of ourselves walking, and the block it out. It's pretty rough in terms of blocking, and I got a lot of great feedback for it. It was supposed to be vanilla, as in no personality is being shown in the walk, but clearly there's a lot showing still, so I need to tone it down a lot. But this is my planning for my shot.

And here is my blocking!

First Second Class!

Had my first class for AN02 the other day! My mentor is pretty awesome, and all the people seem like they're really nice! Our assignment was to make an action pose involving 2 of the same character, Stella. I had to leave to fly out to Colorado Tuesday night, so I didn't get much time to do anything crazy. But these were some of my sketches. You can definitely see here who has influenced me over the years in terms of sports....

and this is the render that I submitted for the assignment!

This is my final render with all of my fixes.

New Mini's for Etsy!

I finally got around to updating my Etsy shop! It only took a few months, but I got a bunch up there. There's still a ton more minis sitting in a cardboard box that I still need to photograph. If you want to check them all out, head over to https://www.etsy.com/shop/DesignByLJ Here's a sneak peek of what's to come!

Class 01 Animation Basics Final Reel!

It was a rough semester but it's over! Now I can finally have a weekend off to update all of my new mini Etsy paintings to sell!  Between working two jobs, getting used to only working on this class in all my spare time, going out of town so much, and my laptop completely breaking and having to buy a new computer...but it's done! This is basically how I feel right now...haha

My demo reel is officially turned in and completed! This is how it turned out! If you want to see a better version, you can view it on my portfolio site at http://www.lindseymjones.com/animation-mentor/

My next class starts on Sunday, which is basic body mechanics. My mentor for that class is a senior animator from Blue Sky Studios. I'm trying to hit a different studio for every class to guarantee different styles of animation. My mentor for class 1 was very cartoony and exaggerated. You can tell because he worked at Sony. This is a link to Joe's IMDB to see what he has worked on. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3309484/ I guess this means it's time to apply for jobs again...oh joy.

Personality Walk Splined

This is my final submission for the personality walk. For this assignment, we had to spline it out, and create all the in-betweens. I ended up going pretty far from my original blocking, and ended up with this crazy walk.

And for our poses, we had to show balance. I wanted to get a bit of ungracefulness in there, because everything I saw was either ballet or gymnastics or yoga. Characters perfectly aligned, doing great things. So I wanted to go with more of a person standing on a rolling chair, and it starts to spin around type feel. So these are the sketches I came up with.

Then I thought about how I was little, and would always try and stand on the fire hydrant, waiting for my school bus. I could never balance myself on it, because there was only room for one foot.

and now this is my final render

Personality Walk Blocking

For this assignment, we had to block out our personality walk. It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to go with. I shot a lot of reference video, and ended up doing one walk in particular. It was almost a double bounce walk, with the feet leading toe first. This is my planning for it.

And then this is my walk. I got a lot of feedback about how the mood was confusing. It looked like a sneak, and it looked like a stomp. I needed to go with a certain idea, which I didn't really do. I kind of just combined a bunch of different aspects of the walk, and there's no clear emotion here.

Our pose for this week was to pose out exhaustion. I could definitely relate to this one. Especially having to work 2 jobs, take these classes, and still end up with no money by the end of the week. These are all of my ideas for the pose.

I really wanted to go with the stair one, but his head was just way too big, and his body looked funny on stairs, unless they were massive. And now this is the pose I submitted for it. I ended up using a lot of pictures of homeless people as reference. I was thinking about exercising, and if you were running around the park, and needed a break. Which led to homeless people sleeping on park benches. 

and based on my mentors critiques, this is my final render!

Vanilla Walk

For our assignment this past week, we had to complete our vanilla walk. I splined him out, and added all of the in-betweens. This is my final result.

And our pose for this week, was to show concern. It was kind of tough being original with this one. My sketches came out either depressed, or excited. I was originally going to go with more of a stressed out, pacing back and forth idea, but that came out kind of hard to read. 

So the next best thing? Kids! Kids always bring out the concern in parents. So I figured adding Ballie in, would be the only way to convey that properly. So here is how my pose ended up.

And here is how my final render turned out based on my mentors notes!

Vanilla Walk Blocking

It's finally time for a walk cycle! This past week at Animation Mentor, we are doing vanilla walks. I chose to use the character Ballie. We are only blocking out the shot, and then next week we are splining it together. This is what i did for the blocking.

And then our pose for this week was to show physical strength. I originally wanted to do something along the lines of an egyptian building the pyramids, or a firefighter holding the heavy hoses. I even found a to of suitcase reference images, which I can relate to myself for always overpacking.

 I ended up using Stu lifting up the couch to try and get Tailor out from underneath. There have been so many times I was trying to find my rabbit when she was still a tiny bunny. She almost always ended up underneath the couch or bed. 

And now this is my final render.