11secondclub - November Winner

Last month's 11 Second Club winner is pretty cool! I like the simple setup where the focus is purely on her acting. The timing on the gesture for "stick around" and how she moves her hand over her leg I like as well. Overall really solid. Nice render too. Congratulations Nikolay Vanecyan!

11 Second Club - June 2013 Competition

Yeah, once again, not gonna happen. I'm telling you, the moment I wanted to do the 11 Second Club competition every month for practice purposes was the beginning of having absolutely no time whatsoever. Granted, the same month I also had a baby so the timing was probably not well chosen.

Anyway, this month my parents where here so I only had today to work on it (excuses, excuses), but the weather is so nice outside, why should I be inside animating, trying to cram something into 9 hours until the deadline hits, if I can be outside enjoying Summer with my family? So once again, nothing is going to happen this month. BUT NEXT MONTH!!

But I still wanted to post my layout and ideas, since I was actually excited to do that one. I figured, given the audio, that there would be a lot of video game and arcade stuff (granted, my very first idea was at a fair, with the "claw" arcade grabbing a dead rat amongst all the old toys). So I settled on two rats in a laboratory, specifically, in a maze:

To explain what's going on here:

- first shot reveals the geography of the set, so that the audience understands where we are. This maze would be in the middle of a lab and half way through the shot a scientist would come into frame at the top and reach for the little door in front of the rats.

 - the reach would happen across the cut and ...

- ... reveal the two rats, one a bit dumber than the other. He's the one freaking out after a head turn and seeing what has opened in front of him. He flails his arms into to other guy's face and ends up grabbing and shaking him. At the end of the shot he starts running towards the camera ...

 - ... which carries across the cut. The smarter rat cleans himself up and turns/walks towards the camera as he delivers the line. The dumber one disappears behind the corner and the beeps you hear are markers (lights would go on) that signal when the rat passed a certain check point. At the end the dumber rat would wave a piece of cheese above the walls as he delivers his line.

 - We see him holding the piece of cheese, finishing the wave, when there's a rip and a bony arm swings into frame and the rat goes uh oh. The camera pans left and reveals a dead rat who was holding on to that piece. Upon realizing what he's seeing and holding, he gently puts the piece of cheese back done while delivering his lines/sounds.

That's it. I would have loved to do animal and acting animation combined, but hey, you gotta plan and not procrastinate. Like I said, next month, I will start my monthly exercises.

Riiiiiiiiiiiiight...

11secondclub Critique by Mike Stern

The current winner Aju did a fantastic job and if you want to hear feedback regarding the shot, watch Mike Stern's eCritique.

11secondclub - September Winner

I like this one a lot. I love how the pauses between the audio are being used! Watch the winning entry here.

Practice, practice, practice!

Isn't there a saying that you need to get a thousand crappy drawings out of your system before you get a good one? Well, the same is true about computer animation. You have to practice and not be burdened with the pressure that every shot or sequence you start will end up on your demo reel (more about this in a later post). And my plan is to do just that.

But give me every option available and no deadline and it's going to take me ages until I decide on something. Deadlines and restrictions are one of my favorite things at work. I love finding the most creative solution within a set of restrictions. It's like a puzzle! ("It's like a big old mammogram!").

Enter the 11secondclub.

One of the things I've wanted to do for a while but never had the time for, was submitting entries for the 11secondclub. It's perfect for what I need. A DEADLINE! Each month!

So from now on I will do just that, enter a clip each month using every spare minute that I have. And it doesn't matter how much time I spent on it, how crappy it is, it's all about practice, practice, practice.

So here we go! This is my entry for the month of May. For this month, I had a day where the stars aligned and I was granted 10 hours of free time (sort of). I dove right into it and submitted the work about 2 minutes before the end of the deadline! HAHAHA! Better start practicing and improving my timing for that as well!

The clip was fun to do, especially the ending, where I totally went overboard. I just wanted to practice and have fun. There's a good mix of reference and imagination, pose to pose and straight-ahead animation in there. I loved it! And the Malcolm rig from AnimSchool is fantastic! So many controls, but never confusing! Btw. the stairs were built using this kick ass tool: Davveys Stair Generator 1.1.2 (maya script)

The clip here is zoomed in and rendered, which was not what I submitted but I prefer this one. Can't wait to start the next clip!

Here are also the usual suspects of formats: Vimeo and Quicktime