Big News!

So yesterday I had a phone interview with Sony Pictures Imageworks and they called back two hours later and said I got the job! I can't express how excited I am about this opportunity. Everything I've worked up to so far is paying off. Woo! The studio is in Albuquerque, NM and I start on January 10th. I'll be working on animation for 'Green Lantern'... trailer here:

Thanks to everyone that has helped me get this far! Can't wait to start working!

New Reel and CTN

It's of course been too long since my last submission. A lot has happened. I ended my job with Plow Digital to pursue a life long dream of working in the film or video game industry in California. I moved to San Diego in August and have been working on my own time getting animation back into my daily routine. It's been quite rewarding and I know that this is my passion. You can download my most recent demo reel here:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/293523/jamesWardReel.mov

I'm also heading up to Burbank for the CTN Animation Expo where I plan to learn a whole lot about the art form and meet lots of exciting people. Really looking forward to it. I'll try to post some pictures and tell about the experience in another post later. Wish me luck!

Last Front: Europe

"Last Front: Europe" was released on Itunes today! This game was started a little over 6 months ago, but it's finally out. I must say that I'm very proud of the work I've done for this game. I started by doing all the animations for the characters, vehicles, and explosives. Then got to work on most of all the game balancing and map making. I then worked on producing the PR videos and did the animated intro for them (which you can view here...)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CPyoCQ-7Gg&feature=channel



I'm very glad I had the opportunity to work on this game. I learned a lot about game design and optimizing my animation. If you own an Iphone or Ipod Touch, please support us and download this game. It's got hours and hours of playability and you can even download custom maps or create your own, so that there is always new content. Just click on the link below to download from Itunes!

Last Front: Europe

Reel time

*UPDATE

Okay, Here's the latest reel that I have. Please download it from my dropbox at this link:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/293523/jamesWardReel.mov


I've been just relaxing for the most part since school has been over, but now I've been getting the animation itch lately. So I think I'm going to plan on submitting something for May's 11 second club competition.. (11 second club) should be fun!

I also tried a little test in stop motion the other day. It's not very long, but it was fun to work on.. it required a LOT of tedious photoshop work though, heh.



and last but not least.. we released our first Iphone game at work. It is a flash card program for kids to learn letters, numbers, colors, and shapes. No reason to get it unless you have a child, but the illustrations are top notch and I did all the animations on it. It was hard at first to work on something as limiting as the Iphone, but I think we worked within those limitations and came up with something that looks great and serves a purpose. So if you have children, or know any, be sure to download this. and 15% of the proceeds we make go to the Children's Wish Foundation, which is a great cause. Find out more info here: www.preksafari.com

I also made this gameplay video using after effects:

Alright, well that's my update. I'll be sure to let you know how the internship thing goes and I'll probably make an update when I get the animation done for the 11 second club. Take care!

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!

Last class at AM!

Wooo! alright, so the break is over. I had a great christmas and new years and have charged my battery to get ready to start knocking out this crazy thing called a short film. Christmas was awesome, I got the Art of Wall-E and Art of Kung Fu Panda books. Very inspiring stuff. I love my new phone, the LG Dare :) my brother got me a trip to Vegas in June, so that is gonna be amazing! And I happened to get myself a present for myself. A new computer!

So yeah, to geek out for a few seconds: It has 2 tb hard drives, 8 gb RAM, Intel Dual Core 8500, geforce 8800 gtx card, windows xp x64 bit, and it just looks sexy with those blue lights :)

I wanted this new machine to gear up for starting to take on my short film so I just bought all the parts and I've been really happy with it.

So as far as animation goes, I finished up class 5 before break. It was basically all the pre-production of my short film. My mentor was Kenny Roy (http://www.kennyroy.com/) and he was very inspiring. We went through a lot of changes with my story, but it was all good for me cause we arrived at something I will be proud of when I finish it. In class we did the storyboard in 2d (flash) and then the layout in 3d:






So I'll start working on full out animation next week, still some things that need to be tweaked, especially with models and textures, but I want to try to just focus on the animation.

K, wish me luck and the best of luck to everyone in 2009! heres some shorts for inspiration :)

A Short Love Story in Stop Motion
Fallen
Oktapodi
Greed
Burning Safari
Tim Tom

Flash Walk Cycles

Here are a few walk cycles I've done in Flash. We have an in-house illustrator that designed all the characters and usually breaks up the pieces for me. I make everything move. So here's just a few of the characters we've used in games and their walk cycles. I just kinda threw this together, so there's no music or anything added to it.


Flash Walk Cycles from James Ward on Vimeo.