Week 8: O_O

Studio 13:

I‘ve been assigned to animate Jordan (our character) for the last scene; Jordan turns around in a chair, sees the dog relaxed, then reaches for his phone (about 20 seconds altogether). I’m feeling... happy-nervous....about this.

We’re using Dropbox to reference our respective preset scenes (complete with locked off cameras and lighting). This nearly caused a problem for me as I don’t have my own laptop with the Dropbox app to link to Maya, but in this instance I will simply download the .ma file scene, then reference it so it remains undamaged. On the other hand, the animation for Jordan and any objects he interacts with, I will be exporting out separately. Hopefully this slight break in protocol doesn’t affect anything later on.

As soon as I was assigned a shot, I imported the most recently updated rigged character and practised keyframing the main poses using animation layers. I imported a miniaturised version of the boss dog to use as a placeholder for the 2D dog. I was quite happy for my first go.

We had our production meeting early this week; the storyboards, rig, lighting and cameras got a slight update, so I didn’t start my first animation pass till then. We also filmed someone acting out the whole storyboard to use as a universal video reference amongst us animators. #helpful

During class we went through setting up lighting, separating them into AOV passes and render layers. It was a lot to remember. When I'm stressed, I don't remember things too well. I think I'll be ok in post production.

I might hide it well sometimes, but the stress is weighing me down a lot now. I think I'll be ok.

See you next week!