Metmorphosis

Well I think its finally kicking in. That subtle beginning to change where you realize that you are becoming whatever it is your trying to obtain.
I was standing at the bus stop when it happened. Waiting... impatiently as usual. We've been working on walk cycles and everything else at school and I was anxious to get home and back to work. Suddenly I realized there was just as much to learn right where I was standing. Across the street a bus going the other way let off a crowd of people and I began to watch them as they disembarked. They were walking. I looked for the little kick we all give before or front foot lands in front of us and watched to see how straight each individual's back leg became as they pushed off of it. I watched to try and see how much difference their is in a person's height at their highest and lowest points.
I saw one man leaning forward somewhat stiffly, his arms taut at his sides, and noted how it made him look determined and or angry. I filed that posture away in my memory banks for when I need to make someone walk down the street angrily, or with great purpose.
I was standing there still when the bus pulled up. I could have stood there for hours, just watching people and I thought to myself, I may never be bored again.
Anyway the hard work continues.
We are doing portraits of our characters for character design class. First in black and white and then in color. Above is the latest on that. We all had to do the same thing. Jack the giant killer. But we each got to do our own take on it. I decided to make mine into a Western.


We have a number of drills we do in Animation class but every weekend I try to attempt something a little harder. I posted the last two here:


Basketball

Man Versus Monkey



They are not close to done, but I doubt if I'll ever bother to correct all the timing issues they have. I just do what I can each weekend and then move on to next week's class. They were both fun to try and I learned quite a bit on each one. I can't wait till I can really start doing some more impressive work.

Final film

Well I guess this day had to come sooner or later. It's a funny thing. We all worked our butts off for 6 months on our films and now none of us can stand to watch our own movies. But its time I posted mine for all the folks back to home to watch.

watch it here

It came out okay, but I hope the next one is better.
Heres the poster that I made for it too.
Take care all.

-DaVinci

Week 2

Well they don't waste much time at Think Tank. We have several projects, two of which are Creating a character concept and sculpting a humanoid figure from the skeleton up.
We were allowed to mix genres and pretty much do whatever on our character, but that character had to be Jack the giant slayer. I decided to do mine as a western/fantasy mix. That's jack over there. We learned some cool techniques for fleshing out basic characters. One is to just start with the silhouette.

The skeleton will eventually be covered in muscles and then turned into a character. Probably something from Marvel or DC. His pose is just a basic one to be adjust later, but I think he has an interesting character already. I'm not quite sure if he's shrugging (what, me worry?) or if he just wants a hug.

Speaking of Marvel, our character design instructor writes and draws for Marvel. And our animation teacher actually did some of the animation on Star Wars episode one. He is a cool guy but its so weird when we're sitting in this tiny classroom with him and he starts saying things like "George Lucas said something to me once that I'll never forget..."

I can't really imagine a better place to have landed. Life is funny that way... When I first came out here I didn't even know that think tank existed, but now it feels like this was the reason I came here all along.

Think Tank

So I find myself at a new school.
VFS finished up in late June (graduation is on the 5th) and I had about six days off before I was in another program, at another school.
Goodbye VFS hello Think Tank Training Centre. http://www.tttc.ca/
I like the new school. It's a little small for a person of my proportions. There's a pipe suspended from the ceiling that I'm pretty sure has my number, but I have successfully evaded it up to this point.
The place is smaller, but so are the classes. There are only seven of us, so that means more individual attention which is good. This class is similarly diverse, if not even more so. There is, Hercules from South Africa (One time the teacher came in and we were the only two in the class. We introduced ourselves as Hercules and DaVinci and the instructor stared at us incredulously. There's Yerald from Venezuala dn Yoav from Isreal, Jackie from Canada, and Rodrigo from Brazil and mat from Australia who fell down on his bike and has been wandering around with a bandage on his face, drinking soup and soda from a straw, poor guy.
All of the instructors are really enthusiastic and energetic. I think this will be a great environment for me to keep building my skill set.
I will be posting my final short from VFS soon, but I have to compress it down to a smaller file size first.
Thanks to everyone who has read about my experiences at VFS. I will try to keep updating at Think Tank and hopefully in 8 months I will be blogging about my new job.