Spline Doctors

I have always wondered what it was like to be at Pixar Animation Studios. So when I first discovered splinedoctors, and tuned in to listen to the podcasts, I was dumbfounded about as much as when I first discovered the Animators Survival Kit by Richard Williams. My insides screamed, "TREASURE!!!" and I'm sure I'm not the only one grateful for all the interviews and podcasts on there with the team at Pixar.

Each of the interviews are a lecture in itself with priceless information, priceless I tell ya! And I am continually blown away with all the discussions and I've only just gone through a few of the early podcasts. One of the greatest things about it is how informal all the interviews are and how you can FEEL the passion and sincerity of the answers.

The resources for animation is vast on the internet, simply incredible.

Ed Hooks!

I've ordered a copy of "Acting for animators" by Ed Hooks today.

I've actually read the book about 2 years ago and even met Ed twice during his workshops at Animex, in the last 2 years. He's a really great guy - I remember seeing him in one of his talks and I thought to myself, "He looks like the happiest man alive".

I've recently finished studying "The Artist's Complete Guide to Facial Expression" by Gary Faigin. Now I say "study" instead of read because I found that by reading something, you skim through the facts and remember the points that stick out the most; while all the filler materials may be skipped. On the other hand, when you study something, you focus. You turn off the music in the background and stop all your activities and just sit down and prepare your brain to absorb information. I believe it makes a lot of difference.

I say this because I'll admit to only have read through Acting for Animators 2 years back and haven't properly absorbed the information as much as I allowed myself to. This time I'll work my way through the book and do it justice!

Layout fixed! (Hopefully)

Thanks to my good friend Matt, I was finally able to fix the header layout. It turns out I do need help in the end!

Anyways, I've got more posts coming up and will be posting them soon.

Layout needs tweaking

I've been told by a coder friend that there are some javascript issues screwing up the entire page and that the layout is broken in IE8. It seems that the original blog template I started with was a little messy.

I've also been trying to get the header buttons/images to work, as you can see there is some overlapping going on. I'll look more into fixing this soon!

Blog layout and website

It's taken me a while to customise my blog from blogspot.com to this site. I'm no expert at html or coding; but I feel pretty good for being able to customise it this much on my own. I even designed and built this site from scratch, which was actually my first time without assistance!

Yup... so that's me done with being impressed with myself. Haha.

Let me know if there are any problems or requests for the site, thanks!

Weight shift test

Another recent animation test. This time I'm focusing on the hips and feet in the action of weight shifting. I'm also exploring the cushioning of my key frames to get smooth motions.

Eye test animation

Here is an eye test animation I did a few days ago. What started off as a cartoony "surprised" take eventually molded itself into this.

This took about an hour and a bit.

First Post!

Hello there!

My new portfolio site is finally up and running! For the record, this website came online last week; but I’ve only just managed to get the blog up today.

I intend to use this blog as a means of posting up my test animations, and works in progress and also to blabber about my animation findings and what not.  Hopefully someone would find them interesting!