Jen's Art Journal

Well Spring Semester at CalArts is off to a promising start. Some nice new classes added to the mix, an animatic I'm considering done by now(just have notes to keep in mind when I start animating on Monday!), and the beginnings of some layouts/backgrounds on my film. So as far as classes:

Tuesday was my 3D animation class with the new teacher--John Aquino. He gave a little bit of background about himself, he was originally a 2D animator at Disney and when they switched to 3D he made the adjustment and has since been working(10 years and running) in 3D(between Maya and 3D Studio Max since he talked about both a bit). Since our past 3D teacher left unexpectedly I'm assuming the new teacher John was called very shortly before the semester started(I'd say a week or less), so at this point I'm remaining open-minded about the class. He did promise lots of animation so I'm hopeful.Wednesday I had one of my critical studies classes: Origin of Animal Behavior. It seems like a pretty cool class, basically finding a link between the motivations between the behavior in animals vs. humans. Today(Thursday) was the usual lifedrawing and I'm completely rusty. Horrible drawings were made in those couple of hours. Aftewards I had my other critical studies class: Animation and 'the body', this critcial studies class I'm really looking forward to. For one 98% of the class are all character animators and secondly the class is going to be a lot of watching movies and analyzing the human portryal, whether how the animators made the motions look believable(like in 3D) or how a human is represented, etc. Covers a lot of aspects that I haven't really considered before so I'm thrilled I signed up for it. Afterwards, my always favorite class---Traditional Animation. Great lecture about layouts, the teacher told us he'll be making a shift from pure animation to covering the basics of filmmaking and how to translate these basics to animation. He showed us several clips and examples of layout, camera shots, etc. and broke them down scene-by-scene. Exactly the kind of class I need right now. Lots of information was shoved into my head and I'm hoping to nail-down my backgrounds this weekend with this information in mind.

I begin animating my film on Monday(backgrounds or no backgrounds)---Monday marks exactly 3 months until films are due and according to my animatic, I have 25 scenes to animate! Anyways, in the mean time--thanks to the help of a fellow character animator who occasionally passes by the blog here---I've transferred my animations from my VHS tape to computer so I have a nice version of all of my animations I made last semester...this means a little montage of everything I did, including 2 projects I've never posted before: A stop-motion project whose sole purpose was the teach us how to use the pencil test machine(so horrid animation ahoy!) and then a flip-book animation....otherwise it's all the same stuff I've posted before only slightly nicer quality. Check out the time, it's longer than my actual student film--so it's actually comforting to know I have animated more than 90 seconds in a span of a couple of months. Well enjoy and here's to a productive weekend!