My Mickey Mouse Degree

They do, or rather more accurately, visiting our university. Not just to look around, oh no, but to tell us stuff about things. It’s good.

Last Friday we had Roger Mason, a storyboard artist (mostly for advertising) and independent comic book creator who helped me with my drawing skills (not with a z, I have no use for skillz right now) last year, and returned to tell us all how to sell out and make a bunch of money.

I’m seriously down with getting me a bunch of money, but I’d rather get paid sod all to be an inbetweener at the moment, it’s this month’s official ‘Bohemian Artist Dream’. The bohemian part is just to sound cool.

Today we were visited by Peter Dodd (I can’t find a site for him), an excessively good 2D animator who’d worked on all kinds of stuff, and is currently working on the keys for Sylvain Chomet’s latest film: The Illusionist.

He gave us a few tips on showreels, timing, portfolio and 2D animation in general, it was effing good. It reminded me of how much I want to be a 2D animator, which is pretty hard to do because I’m ALWAYS thinking about how much I want to be a 2D animator. Especially now because I’m writing about it.

Other things that happened today -

• A visiting lecturer for my Studio Business Practice module called in sick half an hour before he was supposed to show up, so the lecture was cancelled after we all got there.
• A water tank leaked in one of the buildings so the Linux server had to be shut down, which meant we couldn’t do any character animation in uni today. Of course, we found this out after we turned up there too.
• I finished reading Tunes for ‘Toons by Daniel Goldmark, it was immense and has helped me verily with my dissertation research
• I wrote some crap about Scott Bradley for said dissertation that I will probably revise, right now

And that’s about it for today.

(dead link) - WIP Character Animation - (see bottom)
It’s there. Model and rig by Chris Wyatt, animation (unfinished), by me, voice track from ‘Punch Drunk Love’. Super.

There’s a bit of dialogue after this, but I haven’t animated anything to it, so there’s no point me sticking that bit up.

It’s 11 meg, which blows, so I’ll attempt to downsize the bloomin’ thing and upload it again tomorrow, I just figured I’d actually keep a blog-related promise for once and get a version up today. If you can be bothered to wait for the download, enjoy, if you can’t, then you’ll have to wait even longer for me to upload a smaller version. Or you could ignore it altogether. The choice is clearly yours.
Also, never try and use cheap mechanical pencils after any amount of beer, the lead just snaps. It’s shit.

UPDATE!! -

I made it smaller! (and removed the file from here, rendering the above link useless).

Click This

Man, look at me here, posting stuff. Unxpected, eh? I only seem to post here when I’m in a rut, because the rest of the time I’m crazy happy and animating my tits off.

From the previous sentence you may have discovered that, indeed, I am out of that elusive creative juice. Still, Tuesday was a good day, I did a bit of 3D character stuff for one of my assignments and it turned out ‘right proper nice’. Today I attempted to continue with it, and it just turned into a festival of hatred, and swearing.

There was a lot of swearing.

Eventually I decided the best thing to do would be to play SEGA Rally for as long as possible, which is what happened. I feel better now, and will tackle the cursed animation head on tomorrow, full to the brim of enthusiasm giving coffee.

Also, I’ll be rendering out what I’ve got so far at some point tomorrow, so I’ll stick it up here in the evening when I get back from a crit session with some of my friends.

I really have sod all to show at the moment otherwise, and that sucks because I’ve done a bunch of stuff, but it’s all in aid of my uni work and I don’t really want to be plastering that all over the net at the moment (because clearly everyone in the known universe reads this blog).

I did a sheep animation thing a bit back - CLICK!!

It was exciting, but looking at it now, it’s nadgers. I’ll have to do better next time, eh?

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FINALLY, I found this website by some guy (officially referred to as Pete Emslie), which is a little bit awesome. It’s kinda like John Kricfalusi’s blog but without as much ranting (not that I’m adverse to rants, but it’s nice to read things from people who are calm now and again). Still, an excellent place to check out.

The ordeal is now over, join me tomorrow for some 3D character animation excitement.