Gotta have balls

You gotta have balls to be an animator.

At least that's what I'm learning at the moment. Balls, balls and more balls.

And just when you think you've had more than your fair share of balls. You get some more balls.

Okay - I think that's enough with the balls.

Alright - one more: balls.

Night of the Living Dead - Reanimated

I'm thinking about joining a group of animators in re-creating George Romero's classic zombie flick Night of the Living Dead.

Each of the animators selects a piece of the film to animate, then all the results will be stitched together (Frankenstein's monster style) to form a new version of the classic film.

More details

Bouncing ball with rotation

Just a quick post to show an updated bouncing ball assignment I posted for the Animation Mentor Maya Springboard class.

Nothing too exciting here, although I was shooting for a fairly realistic bounce. Not too cartoony.

Getting the rotations right required a bit of maths (2 pi r anyone?) but I got there in the end.

Assignment 3 - posing and staging

This was a render I did from Animation Mentor Maya Springboard assignment 3.

Here was where we got to pose our figure, plus create some props, a set and insert some cameras to get some storytelling angles.

Next steps will be to tinker more with the textures and lighting.

Assignment two

Assignment two was just to get a basic figure in Maya and to set up the hierarchy so that the puppet moved as a unit.

It was stuff that I had done before in a previous class, so I decided to splash out and add a bit of extra flare - like some colours and textures.

The next assignment is to build a set and some props for the character.

Inspiration from Ralph Bakshi

Some great words of inspiration and a kick in the guts from Ralph Bakshi - a true animation pioneer and iconoclast.

Animation Mentor Assignment 001

This is the first assignment for the Animation Mentor Maya Springboard course. Just a simple exercise to create a few NURBS primitives and stack them on a shelf.

Rudd in your eye

Spent some of the weekend messing around in Flash - just to remind myself how to use the tools.

Add a moving mouth and I might have a puppet for a future political cartoon.