Graduation time!

Wow, it's been a long road and it is exciting, sad, and amazing to be done. A year and a half ago I had no idea I would have learned as much as I did about character animation. I've got a giant notebook filled with golden nuggets of information from Animation Mentor that I can keep reading and take something from every time. I'm really happy I got the opportunity to attend this school and I actually feel ready to try and get a job in feature animation. So thanks to all my mentors and fellow students for all the help along the way. It's been a wild ride! :)

For class 6, my mentor was Greg Whittaker, who has worked at Dreamworks for over 10 years. He has a background in 2d, working on Prince of Egypt, and Road to El Dorado. Now he is doing How to Train Your Dragon and just finished Madagascar 2. It was a pleasure working with him. He explained the importance of focusing the audiences attention on what you want them to look at by having it move the most (or the least) to put emphasis on it. I learned a ton from him about polishing and trying to keep things simple. So without further adieu, here is the final animation for my short(minus the opening sequence, which isn't polished):




So there it is. I don't think this is something I want to spend time to model, texture, light, render, add music, sfx... etc. I will probably just try to polish up a few of the better shots and put them on my reel. If I have some time off and no side projects to work on, I might try to revisit the short. I'm proud of the work I've done, but of course there are some things I would have changed. I just don't feel the story is strong enough to warrant the amount of time it would take adding all those things I mentioned earlier when all I want right now is animation for my reel.

Thanks again to everyone that has helped me out or given me comments/critiques. Now the real work begins in trying to find a job this summer. The economy is tough and a lot of people aren't hiring. I'm just hoping with a little stroke of luck I might land an entry level position at a studio. I just want to work on a feature film sooo badly! heh. We'll see what happens. I'm going off to California in July for the Animation Mentor BBQ/Job Fair/Graduation. So I can see the opportunities out there and see my friend Frank Tai, who is working at Pixar now.. (very exciting!) and also meet all the friends I've made at Animation Mentor!

Take care everyone! hopefully I'll update this again when I have a finished reel to show, thanks!