Long-Hai Artist/Animator Blog

So it’s been a long while since I’ve put up any posts concerning new personal work since Animation Mentor. But since I’ve graduated I’ve been itching to take on a new shot with acting and lip sync.

The clip I chose comes from ‘40 year old virgin’ and has Steve Carrell saying the following line:

‘ You know the thing about relationships. Is. That. They. Make one person go. Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah. And the other person go. What ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?! And then the other person goes. blah blah blah blah blah.”

So here it is! Blocking for my pantomime shot. I ran through a gamut of ideas, roadblocks, doubts on this assignment. And its only been the 2nd week of class 3! My new mentor Nick Bruno is awesome thus far. I guess I’ll post what current idea I’m really jazzed about and what will probably end up being my assignment for the next few weeks. Enjoy!

Here is my new assignment. Jump onto a box then jump off. I figured the whole losing a ball/frisbee in neighbors yard thing would be cool. Originally I wanted to do a baseball through a window.. But why would u climb on a box to do that?

Tell me what you think :

I came into this movie a bit skeptical. A lot of Dreamworks movies contain great animation, character design, and ideas. But sometimes some of their films fall short of being the “holy grail ” goal of being a complete film. Kung Fu Panda has the legs below it to become just that. Po( the panda) has a definite sense of empathy that just flows from him in droves. And if you’re a student of Chaplin, you know thats where it all begins for either great audience to character identification or comedy foundation. Animation was nothing short of amazing. Character designs by Nico Martlett were awesome to behold. Voice acting, although bloated with stars was decent. I liked the turtle and the mantis. Both my favs. But i have an odd habit of liking the oddball characters.

here is my pose for EXHAUSTED.

So last week we finished up our walk cycle. Which i’ve never been good at, but have learned droves in the process of trying to create one. Needless to say, the critique from my mentor Martin Hopkins was invaluable and I plan on doing a revision this week for a re-submission.

Here are a few jpgs of our pose. CONCERN. It was a particularly tough assignment this week because it was a pose that had a high potential to resemble something else like sorrow or remorse or like the pose we have to do this week. EXHAUSTED. So I had a tougher time than usual. So coupled with a walk cycle i was pretty much at wits end.

Here is also a planning pass of my personality walk for THIS week.

And the QT at the top is my blocking for week 10.

So this week we’re tackling the basic walk. Its a pretty involved process so animation has been divided into blocking this week. And animation refinement next week. So just key poses/ breakdowns and extremes in stepped mode this week. We also have another pose assignement. STRENGTH. Tough one to get my mind wrapped around because i’m always trying to go anti-cliche. Not sure I succeeded in going against the grain, but heres how it went.

And heres my walk planning:

Here is my planning for Tailor. Basically a bouncing ball with a tail. Should be fun!

So wayy late. But the Mentors in Animation lecture was amazing to say the least. So here we had Andreas Deja ( Jaffar, Scar, Lilo) James Baxter ( Rafiki, Stallion, Enchanted 2d sequence), Pete Doctor ( Director of Monsters Inc. 1st class Cal Arts) and Eric Goldberg ( Genie from aladdin and worked with Richard Williams). It was well organized as they went up, show’d a clip of Disney animation from the nine old men that related to a scene they had animated. So Andreas Deja for example screened a clip of Malificent ( Marc Davis) before he screened a clip of Jaffar. Mentioned how he was inspired by it and used it as guidance to further develop his own characters. All these animators never really dealt or worked with the nine old men extensively. Maybe met occasionally ( save for Andreas, he used to visit them during their retirement) but found that they had a profound influence on their work. As a young animator looking upon greats. ( Standing on the shoulders of giants) I was amazed to see these modern greats gawk, drool, and bewildered by the nine old men’s drawings and animation. My favorite part was when Andreas put up a few drawings from his private collection. I believe we got to Milt Kahl/ Marc Davis and James Baxter let out a ” SON OF A BITCH!” It was golden. I felt empowered after wards and really want to make it into character animation ever much more.

So this week for animation mentor we’re going to bounce a ball through an obstacle course. I think we have default obstacles given to us from AM to move around. Then we throw the ball in and have it go nuts. We get the squash and stretch ball this week. So that’ll be crazy fun. We also have a new pose to do, in which the topic is DEVESTATION. Which is pretty depressing if you ask me, definitely not an assigment you wanna spend toooo long dwelling on.

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So our assignment this week was to simply go out and sketch! I work in Santa Monica, so i headed out to a nearby park on Ocean. I have a co-worker in AM with me also, so we just started looking for interesting things to sketch. Lot of tour buses packed with curious travellers, kids feeding pigeons, others eating on park benches, a girl on a cellphone. There was almost too much info out there to sketch.

Well I’m trying to pick one pose from the masses. I ‘ll then take this pose and then use one of the AM human biped rigs to match it.

First Q and A at Animation Mentor was awesome. Martin ( my mentor) is a cool dude with a good sense of humor. My class is from all over the world and we have a wide pool of talent/experiences/and personalities. The following few months look very promising and i’m really excited for the time to come.

Here are a few sketches and doodles.