anthea hearts animation mentor

Week 12, So Long Derek... boo hoo

Well we just had our last Q and A w Derek, and I sam so sad about it. I don't want to let Derek go, he's been such a great mentor. He always has something to talk about at the QNA related to our lectures that week, and was giving us the extra mini Q and A crits which totally helped me a lot. And those Ecritiques were the bomb! Derek always gave really long involved crits and very detailed. He always finds a ton of mistakes I never noticed even though I must have looked at it a million times. Even if I thought I might have done a good job, Derek finds all the tiny parts that I had overlooked and it ends up making my animation way better.

Derek went over each students strengths and weaknesses and things we can improve upon in the coming semesters. For me he told me that I may get overzealous with my planning and preparation stages. I think the reason I do this is trying to procrastinate on starting the project cause I never can decide on an idea. Another problem I have been having is changing things in the middle. For now that's OK since we are in school but in the future I won't have the time to be able to overhaul things in the middle, so I need to just stick with my idea and make it work. I also need to be able to narrow down and choose my project in a more concise manner.

Another important thing I need to work on is remembering to include all the basics that I have been learning all along. It's so easy to get caught up with all the new lessons we are learning and miss the important principles that really make a shot polished and clear. For instance on the emotion project I learned a great big lesson about how important breakdowns are, then the entire project became about the breakdowns for me and I ended up overlooking some other important principles. In animation there is so much to keep track of and staying on top of all of it is something I surely need to work on. We are building slowly up block by block with all these principles.

Derek also told me I can improve on my reference capture. He said it's really easy to get over aware and end up over miming your actions while you are taping them. He said a good way to avoid this is to practice the action a lot with the camera off, practice until it becomes natural.

So all in all it was a great semester, I feel like I made a lot of progress and learned a lot. Every week there were big breakthroughs. I feel like I have improved and hopefully that will continue into the next term.

AM Class 3 : ACTING 1, here I come!

posted by anthea @ 7:54 PM