Happy Birthday to Me

I turn 22 today. Going to see Coraline in 3D tonight. Full review later.

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DDLM Update

After posting the awesomeness that was the Coraline swag. I feel obligated to post an update on DDLM. Things are going better than I felt they were going. I really have to hunker down and do a bunch of easy shots for next week, but as long as I work every night I should on schedule. All in all, if I follow the schedule, animation on the film will be finished by April 8th, and then I'll be compositing and doing sound design work up until we have to hand film in. I'm thinking about downloading the Hallelujah Chorus to play after I finish rendering and exporting and compressing my film.

I will blare it and gaze up into the ceiling and proclaim my film finished. Still a long way to go on that though. Gotta keep working.

Coraline Swag!

The UArts Animation Department got the coolest surprise ever today. We received a giant box of swag from Laika for Coraline. Vee and I said, "Holy Crap!" simultaneously and darted up the stairs. I got everything that was available (without doubling up) and was quite excited for the rest of the day.

Four pens:

Two button sets:

A poster (I actually grabbed this one from Fat Jacks Comics, but the same one came today.):

And a t-shirt (which I was stoked for):

I have to say, I love viral marketing and free stuff. Especially free Coraline stuff. I am going to see the movie in 3D on my birthday, February 15. I can't wait. The story is just awesome and the animation looks great. I hope it is as cool as my expectations are for it.

Nearly Complete Goals for Winter Break

Just finished drawing the closing shot of my senior thesis. It took about a week to finally get the animation done. The shot's about twenty seconds long and is the first time i really had to choreograph a shot to music, so there were set frame limits I had to hit. Which actually, more often than not, meant I had to add frames to my timing charts to get it right. Thankfully the most often of number where I had to do that was eleven frames. Which meant I would figure out the timing for five inbetweens and then inbetween the inbetweens. In the end my timing charts looked like this:



I'm shooting it tomorrow along with the animation for my opening shot, which are just two loops of animation that have to be composited together in AFX. I can't wait to get down to business finishing up those shots. The opening shot just needs the animation cleaned up and dropped in for it to be complete. The closing shot needs to have the background and a few clouds to be built, then the lighting has to get set up in AFX and the camera moves and all that jazz. That's gonna be really fun. Maybe i'll get the animation for the second to last shot done so I can shoot that too and have even more stuff finalized for DDLM.

Gonna start putting together a new reel soon so that I can start selling myself or something. I probably should start trying to find a job. I really hope I can get something I can tolerate that's here in the city and then work on a new short on the side. I'm still trying to figure out what to do if I have that teacher's aid job, should I get a part time job with flexible hours so that when I start at school, I have the time to work that job and the other job? These are questions I should find the answer to soon.

I'll post some new art to finish off this post.

Helpful Tips for Animating a Short

Jim Capobianco of Pixar has been making a short on his own called Leonardo. It looks cute, and I'll probably see it at a festival sometime soon, but what I'm really interested in are his little nuggets of wisdom about making a short animation. I found his blog through CartoonBrew and now I'm passing it on here because I just have to share this. He has great ideas and I figured it would help out my fellow seniors pushing their way through their thesis.

Opening Camera Move 1

Well I've been doing some work on DDLM and I worked out the opening shot basically but I need to smooth it out. I'm trying to figure out how to do it without messing with what I've already done. But here's the shot basically without any animation. I'll post the smoother version later.


opening title camera move - DDLM from Vince Mascoli on Vimeo.

Any help is appreciated. The current camera move was made by parenting the camera to a null object and separating that objects XYZ axises that makes the camera easier to move in a single direction but it makes the movement stiff and bumpy. If there's some expression that can be used to curve the path that would be awesome. My guess is there isn't so I'll be working on a null object that has a bezier curve path to solve this one.