Introduction

Hello all,

I'm new to this, and as such my first post will be kept short, or I'll try to at least.  Just a little introduction into what it is that I'm doing and where I'm at doing it.

My girlfriend and I moved away from Orlando, Fl in June to Dallas, Tx on the prospects of a job offer and the desire for a new city.  Upon arrival, that job fell through which left me to work a grueling manual labor job, which while hard and stressful certainly taught me to appreciate the work I am now doing.  Whilst working this job, I took it upon me to hone my skills as an animator and brush up on my software skills.  I started picking up After Effects pretty quickly, and must say I've grown slightly enamored of the program.  This practicing led me to create a new Demo Reel, which when I resubmitted, got me the job as Graphics Animator for DeepSpaceRobots.  The job is not the most glamourous, but it gets me to practice my art skills all day in the comfort of my living room (it's a remote job).

DeepSpaceRobots has me creating 30-second animations for Holiday E-Cards sent out by our corporate clients.  The animations themselves are actually quite fun to put together, even when I don't exactly know how I'm going to go about an effect.  I'm working primarily within Adobe AfterEffects on these, and the job is getting me tons of invaluable experience with animation in general, as well as with rigging, scripting, visual effects, compositing, and rendering.  Most of the work here is also... temporary.  But I'm hoping I'll still be able to do some stuff after the holidays...

...if not, that's ok.  Because I'm moving back with my girlfriend to Florida come Christmas because I really can't stress this enough: Dallas sucks.  Or at least, Dallas sucks to be in for someone in my position.  If I could get a job at the ReelFX studio here or something else, it could be very fruitful, however as it stands, I'm just in a city with people (we) don't really connect with, and miss our friends.

This summer (and this fall) I came to the realization that my college education, while quite essential and helpful, would not quite cut it in the eyes of a major film studio when I got denied by the hundreds of places I applied to.  So I've enrolled in the iAnimate school for animation.  It's really quite great, founded by a bunch of DreamWorks Animation Studios animators, they really sit us down and take us step by step through the process, really working each of down at an individual level.  The instructors are wonderful as are all the rigs and assets provided to us by the school.  As someone who used to complain a lot about the quality of the rigs in school (sorry guys) I must say I'm incredibly happy with them, as they are better than anything you can find for free online.  And they should be, after all they were rigged by DreamWorks riggers.

I'm currently in Workshop 2 of 7, I skipped Workshop 1 because iAnimate felt I already had a solid enough background in Animation to skip the basics (thankfully).  However, they and I agreed that my body mechanics were pretty rough, so here I am in workshop 2 and it's really more than I could hope for.  My instructor Stephen Melegrano, a senior animator at DreamWorks, and having worked at places such as ReelFX, Sony, and Pixar, is excellent and has walked us through all the principals of animation that I always wanted to know but just didn't know where to look.  This workshop focuses solely on body mechanics, not acting.  At first I was slightly disappointed in this, but as I've gotten into it I've realized just how necessary this really was.  My first assignment was a walk down the stairs, a little more difficult than the standard walk cycle, but not too bad.  The second assignment I had my character sit down, something that I was actually quite surprised at the level of difficulty of, yet with persistence I produced a quite solid animation with believable weight.  My third animation, which I am currently working on and will detail in a later post, is about extending the reach of my character.

Something I also have appreciated with iAnimate is the use of Snippets.  These are short animations that focus on a particular body part such as the feet and ankles, hips, torso and arms, or neck for example. (Though I think these snippets later become more complex)  I'm really finding it helps to be able to ignore the rest of the character and just focus on one body part to learn how it works.

As for now, I think I'll close up this rather lengthy introduction and hope things continue to progress.  From now on, I'll be detailing what I'm working on.