Some old animations from Uni

For the record I thought I'd post some of my earlier animations when I was still a student at Teesside Uni:

Not Typed (2008)
This animation was done in my spare time during my Second Year at Uni to practise my first character performance animation. It was entered into the 11 second club competition of December 2008 and got 50th place. Later it was entered into the VIS awards (2009) and won me a Character Animation Award which got me a one year placement at Ubisoft Reflections.

Trapped (2009)
This animation was also done in my Second Year at Uni for my 3D Character Animation module. This was fun to do to practise body mechanics and clear storytelling (without the use of audio).

For any students reading my blog, remember to keep looking for ways to improve. Animation is very hard work and you can't expect to succeed if you don't put the time in.

Thanks to Lynn for the email which inspired this post.

First Class Honours!

I just received my degree results from my University today.

I got a Bachelor Of Arts in Digital Character Animation With First Class Honours! Can't be more pleased about this. It's time to celebrate with some sushi.

Animex Week

Last week I attended the Animex International Festival of Animation and Computer Games (8-12 feb). What an awesome week that was! It had one of the greatest lineup of speakers this year: James Baxter (Dreamworks), Andrew Schmidt (Pixar), Michael Defeo (Blue Sky) and Ed Hooks, to only name a few!

The speakers talked about their latest projects and provided great insight into the industry. Perhaps the best of it all was the networking event. All the pros stacked into one room, where they are open for discussions, answering questions and providing feedback. What more can you ask for? I made the most out of it, spoke to most of the speakers, and got feedback on my animations. The kind of immediate feedback from the pros is a rare opportunity indeed and I have learned so much from them and now have a good insight of how I can progress forwards and push my animations to the next level.

Listed below are my key points of improvement in my future projects:

1. Staging
-Camera placement is important to how well a sillhoute reads
-Keep head/facial within the frame of your shots

2. Less is more
-Find more natural poses
-Avoid over exaggerated poses that aren't motivated.
-Subtlety is key

3. Style
- Explore a more definite style of animation
- Is it cartoony or realistic?

4. Shoulders / Body structure
- Shoulders can be very expressive.
- Explore how the human body is constructed to find how it can move.

Other areas I am keen on exploring:

5. Study body anatomy and rigging
- Should improve my understanding of how each body part can move in relation to each other.

6. Study physics
- A scientific approach to understanding force and how things move in real life

7. More basic animation training
- For a more solid foundation in the mechanics of movement
- After all, the most complex animations is a combination of solid understanding of the basics.

So there you go, a lot to learn with so little time!