A Story About Humility

By Jacob | December 13, 2008

I was watching some DVD extras concerning Jack Lemmon. If you aren’t familiar with him, I really think you should start renting some of his movies - you might thank me. He is a very talented actor whose career spanned nearly 5 decades.

During the short extra I was watching, Jack’s manager shared an anecdotal, and rather personally resonant story.  I’m paraphrasing:

Shortly after Jack won his first Academy Award, he was walking down the street in New York with another actor.  Not someone who was famous, but a character actor who had been around a while.  Jack was being rather uncharacteristically full of himself.  For most of his life Jack was known as an incredibly humble person, but this was early on in his career and he was acting fairly egotistical. He was boasting about his award and talking about how well he had done and how much everybody loved him.

They happened to be walking through the Theater District and there were actors all over the place.  Jack’s friend pointed around to a few of them, “You see that guy over there? Or that guy over there? Or that guy over there?  They are all just as talented as you are,” he continued, ” the only difference is that you got the part and they didn’t.  You were given the opportunity to show yourself, and they haven’t yet.”

After that Jack was one of the humblest guys around.

Wow.  What a life lesson.  It also serves to remind me that there are tons of incredibly talented animators out there, and how lucky I’ve been to get some of the chances I’ve had.  I won’t forget it.

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Photos

By Jacob | December 1, 2008

Well I’ve finished working on my first film ever!  I’ve been put onto another upcoming film, and am officially done with Monsters Vs. Aliens.  It was an amazing… what, 14 months?  Wow. Time flies.  I feel like my animation skills have sky-rocketed in that amount of time, but it’s scary to think of how far I still have yet to go.  There are so many insanely-talented people to learn from, and I know I’ve barely skimmed the surface of the knowledge they have to offer.

One such person is Onur Yeldan.  He was my mentor for my first few months at DW.  He pretty much trained me and got me ready to handle the demands of a studio.  Not only is he an amazing animator and mentor, but he is also an amazing photographer (just check out his flikr photostream).  He had his camera at work about a month ago and was taking all sorts of cool pictures.  Here are some that he took of yours truly.


It was Halloween that day.  I went as a Smarty-Pants.  Those are Smarties pinned all over my pants.  Get it…


Look as hard as you want — there isn’t any company-sensitive material on that screen!

Posted in Random | 5 Comments

Video Critique, Another Ball Bounce

By Jacob | November 10, 2008

Sorry it’s been forever since I’ve posted; Monsters Vs. Aliens is in crunch mode for animation, and it’s keeping me pretty busy.  Too busy for much of a personal life.  Or a blog.  Hey by the way, a trailer for Monsters Vs. Aliens is attached to Madagascar 2 — Everyone should go see that!!!

So anyway, this video was recorded months ago, but I am finally posting it here (with Maya’s permission, of course!)


<– Direct Link to Video–>
(to download: right click and ’save as’)
~50mb

Keep in mind the same Disclaimers as last time:

  • I still have a lot to learn - take everything I say with a grain of salt. I am no expert!
  • I have no affiliation with Animation Mentor (even though her playbast has the AM logo).

If anyone would like any sort of follow-up clarification on anything mentioned, or if anyone has any questions, further advice, or thoughts of disgust and hatred, feel free to comment below.


Posted in Animation, Video Crit | 2 Comments

Video Critique, Basic Ball Bounce

By Jacob | September 29, 2008

With Mike’s permission, I am posting the video critique of his ball bounce.
My previous post explained this exercise and the reasoning for it.  Maybe this video will shed some more light on what you can learn from a ball bounce and how nit-picky I can be about something so simple.


<– Direct Link to Video–>
(to download: right click and ’save as’)
~162mb

Disclaimers:

  • I still have a lot to learn, too.  Take everything I say with a grain of salt.  I am no expert!
  • I have no affiliation with Animation Mentor.  Just one friend trying to help out another… 2000 miles away.

If anyone would like any sort of follow-up clarification on anything mentioned, or if anyone has any questions, further advice, or thoughts of disgust and hatred, feel free to comment below.

Posted in Animation, Video Crit | 2 Comments

The Ball Bounce

By Jacob | September 13, 2008

I have some friends who are learning animation. And so am I.
But the point is that I came up with a simple assignment to emphasize the importance of several main aspects of animation: A ball bounce. Now, here is the inevitable conversation I just had with you, the reader:

me: — a ball bounce.
you: Wait. You arrogant jerk. I read The Illusion of Life. They were doing ball bounces back in the old days… like the 20’s or something.
me: I know. It’s an excellent learning tool because it has all sorts of major elements you need to grasp if you want to become a good animator - timing, spacing, arcs, squash and stretch, weight, etc.
you: …
me: ok so I didn’t come up with it. I modified the assignment for my friends who are learning CG animation.
you: Well I do CG animation too. And I did a ball bounce in school. Once. For that intro class. It was easy.
me: In stepped keys only?
you: … blast.

Heres the problem: it’s too easy to let the computer do your work for you. And then you don’t learn anything. If you want to learn spacing then don’t let the computer inbetween your keys. Don’t even look at the graph editor. Use stepped keys and make sure YOU are creating the motion.
Every. Single. Frame.

The only way to get good spacing is to know what kind of spacing you need. The only way to know what kind of spacing you need is to learn how spacing works. The only way to learn how spacing works is by doing it.

Sure, any fool can do a CG ball bounce. You will find hundreds of them all over the internet. Yes, I did a crappy CG ball bounce in school, too. And I can tell you right now I didn’t learn much. I used the graph editor to make sure that the Y translation looked like a series of diminishing parabolas. Screw that. Create every frame. It wasn’t until I did a 2D ball bounce that I actually learned something about spacing and arcs. That was because I was doing it on a frame-by-frame basis. Drawing out every in-between in the exact spot I wanted it. THAT is when you start learning things.

This is a great way to start because it DOES bring back a lot of the importance of the old 2D ball tests; something that was lost when we started learning animation using splines. Once you have a better grasp of timing, spacing, change of shape, arcs, and anything else a ball-bounce can teach you, then you can start learning how to achieve what you want WITH splines.

The computer is good at inbetweening. But you have to tell it HOW to in between. Otherwise you’re not getting what you want, you’re getting what it gives you.

The assignment: Do a ball bounce from the side view using only stepped keys.

This was stated to some friends a few weeks back. They sent me some first passes, we talked about them, they sent more passes, and we talked some more and I did some video critiques for them. It was suggested that I post those video crits on my blog because others might learn from them. I think a lot of things that are mentioned are fairly universal issues that many people struggle with (like me!). So maybe I’ll post them soon…

Posted in Animation | 4 Comments
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