Stumaniac

Upper two poses (based on some cartoon drawings) are communicating frightened.

Posing

OK, time to post another message. Here are rough versions of my sketches (with line of action drawn) for session 102. I selected 7th one for my stu pose but I am not putting it up here. Instead from now on I will only put my extra work and progress reels to my blog which will save me from doing a lot of uploads:) Anyway, I know pose 1 is not good and realistic enough because I did not want to deal with rope tensions and I did not have enough time to refine it (time to go to bed:). The other one, pose 4 can also get better with some minor modifications. I found that when the poses involve sense of weight (like bag in 4) or forces affecting the body shape(1), posing becomes much harder than doing even very fancy looking, eye pleasing poses without noteworthy forces. So I should better work on those more.

Whyanimation Inc.

In my humble opinion; an animator, at least a good one should have a very good eye for not only catching strong poses but also is able to capture movement (whether it is lively seen or is video reference) and do its analysis instantly in his mind. He must be creative, innovative, collaborative, flexible and most important of all dedicated to continuous improvement. In some people’s opinion in Turkey, these qualities are crap, animation or cartoons are nothing to be taken serious or a real business, it is childish, immature but we know these ignorant and “home of fixed idea” people, don’t we? and who cares about them? And for some people, to achieve these in a really all-time working environment and stay positive and healthy are very hard things to accomplish.

So, why one chooses animation? What is his/her driving force, motivation?

From the animator’s perspective of view, these qualities are not obstacles that need to be gained to reach the top; instead they see them as processes of their evolution, they gain them instinctually and as not duties or like but as parts of their lifestyle, enjoyment and enlightenment. And in the end, there is the biggest reward. Creating something from nothing, giving life, character, emotions to the dead material whether it is bits (0,1), lead on paper or bunch of photographs. For me, what equally attractive is telling stories right out of your imaginary world through animation. And animation is such a suitable medium for that. You don’t need fancy equipment, good actors asking for great deal of money or environment to be built. In most of the situations, a piece paper, a computer will be enough. You can have actors with limitless acting and movement capabilities and have environments only restricted by your imagination. So, may this force be with you my animator friends and be sure to use it for the da errr light side!

Meanwhile, my animationmentor experience is officially began and I tell you man:) though only 4 days have passed, it has been quite out of ordinary and fabulous. I met my mentor, James Chiang who looks like a friendly and skillful guy. I look forward to working with him. Other things like tools, videos, people and interactivity were great too. I looked my classmates’ previous work and wow! some of them have a skill level in modeling, animation or graphics such that they can be considered as second mentors to me.

Enough snack talking and let’s get to the business then. I have read class 1 syllabus and decided to draw poses and pose stu (an am rig) according to them, in order to show emotions that are not given in assignments. First emotion is FRIGHTENED. One advice though: do not ever use a ballpoint pen(like me) for sketching.

Tore Andre Flu

Well, am I the luckiest person on Earth or what? Prior to my am experience, I got sick on Friday, having a not much painful sore throat and nothing else. But on Saturday, I was on fire with exhaustion, very very painful throat ache and headache. It reminded me a Ren&Stimpy episode where Ren gets sick and Stimpy nurses him. Ren was looking normal from distant but when the camera zooms in he was looking disgusting with every kind of loathsome thingies on his face. I was a bit in a mood like that. Now I am feeling better with medicine support and great care.

Anyway, I logged into the animationmentor site at 3 am today and it was open! I browsed through the options but since I was very tired, I didn't chat with my classmates or explore in detail. Now I can't log into the site because of the ongoing maintenance I guess. Please don't keep us waiting, AM staff.
Meanwhile I think I am going to optimize and upload my site. Sorry for my crappy writing, eventually it will get better (I hope).