It's Contract Work...

It's nearing the end of the month and I'm sitting on the eve of a new adventure after having finished a handful of others. Tomorrow, my wife and I begin our cross-country road trip to PAX Prime in Seattle, WA! It's been a bit of a rocky road trying to get this far in pursuing PAX, everything from money issues to uncertain time/job commitments. Unfortunately, I have gone the majority of the summer months without meaningful work but in a rather strange turn of events, I recently wound up doing some contract work of sorts: I was hired on as a carpenter's apprentice to help build the BMW Pavilion for the PGA Tour at the Crooked Stick Golf Course in Carmel, Indiana!

Laying the foundation work; I actually put in a good number of those floorboards!

It was good, honest, and mostly clean work with a good dose of heavy-lifting. I worked with some great guys that were thankfully patient with me and easy to work with. My supervisors were probably one of the best parts; they were both from the UK: one was British and the other Scottish. Let me put it this way, our Scotsman could make a sailor blush. He also liked to sing American pop songs.

Two other guys and I put the roof section together; they brought in a crane a few days later so we could actually put it on the building

Mostly done, minus some glass panels and the roof; it's roughly 4,000 square feet and last I heard, they were planning on parking a BMW in the middle of it!

It was a really great experience to work on this building and I'm actually going back to the project after the PGA Tournament to tear it back down and ship it back to the UK; that's right, it's a rental! This whole time I was enjoying the work, I was thinking to myself "it's a shame this isn't really related to the animation industry." Enter the job's foreman. It turns out he got into the temporary structure business by setting up exhibits at E3! He's also done setups at GDC, PAX East, and PAX Prime! How's that for a small world?
     To jump back for a minute, I did actually manage to finish my DigitalTutors character rigging project before adorning a hardhat and toolbelt. For anyone that hasn't at least taken a look at DT, I would highly recommend it. Learning about rigging in my college courses, I quickly decided it wasn't for me. Taking another look at it now after having a bit more knowledge with the program and how it works, DT really made rigging a much more pleasant experience with some pretty decent results! I'm really wanting to try rigging some other character models on my own and thankfully my friend is lending me a couple of his 3D characters for that very purpose. I haven't started anything just yet (looking to get that going after I get back from PAX) but it's definitely something I'm looking forward to!

      I am very happy to say that I was able to spend an evening with some of my good friends from college that I haven't seen in a few months; It's easy to lose scope of things as well as let relationships fall by the wayside and these are some that I am doing my best to maintain. It was good to catch up with those guys and I honestly hope to work with them down the road or if nothing else, keep them in my life.

     On the gaming side of things, my list has slowly progressed; I finally finished Far Cry, Duke Nukem Forever, and From Dust. Far Cry was a good game that I am glad I finally got around to although I will say it definitely had a strong B-Horror Movie vibe to it, for better or worse (personally, I'm a fan of Sam Raimi and the likes). Duke wasn't nearly as bad as some were making it out to be; I don't believe it lived to it's original expectations at all but it was still a decent romp a bygone era in gaming. My biggest problem with it is that it seemed there was a vast amount of empty space; for a man that kicks ass and chews bubblegum, he did a lot more chewing than kicking. It wasn't bad for a bargain bin pick-up but I will say that I don't regret skipping the pre-order. From Dust was another really enjoyable game I am happy to have played; it was one of the many tempting deals from Steam's Summer Sale. The overall gameplay was entertaining and addictive as you literally sculpt the world as you see fit. Towards the end, it did seem like the villagers were a little reluctant to travel perfectly save landbridges to their next goal in favor of making a beeline to the nearest deadly pool of water or bubbling river of lava. I reached a point where I was sure that these poor creatures were simply not supposed to succeed in the grand scheme of the world; sure they had homo habilis beat in terms of technology but I'm sure even he avoided giant pockets of steaming death.
     For the current state of my gaming log, I've recently been diving into both Darksiders II and The Witcher. I really loved the first Darksiders and still consider it a lost gem in terms of art style, character animation, and gameplay; from my short time with the sequel, it is destined to be another favorite of mine aside from one nagging thing: the facial animation. I've brought this up before on THQ's forum as well as the gaming forum Raptr.com but it looks to me as if the NPCs' facial animation actually took a step backward from it's predecessor. Granted, I know that these conversations a running in-engine and not pre-rendered but the NPCs have all the expression of a wooden doll; their mouthshapes vary little more between open and closed with no emotive distinction, the eyes are dead in their sockets with not so much as single eye dart or change in direction, and the eyebrows stay plastered in one spot at all times. It might sound like I'm really harping on this but this very aspect was also what drew me to the original. There were devious smiles, accurate lipsyncs, and overall more emotive faces on the characters that made me want to watch them rather than just read the subtitles to get the gist of things. Take this video below from the first game in which War meets the demon Samael (sorry for any minor spoilers).

 

Now have a look at this conversation between Death and Thane (around 0:49)

 

Like I said, I do realize that the earlier video was something animated in it's entirety beforehand and rendered using the in-game engine whereas the Thane conversation is running in-engine, it's just a tad disheartening to me. Other than that, I am honestly enjoying my time with the game; the world is dripping with style, the sound design is amazing, the platforming and combat are fun and addictive, and the loot-system is a very welcome addition.
     The Witcher. I've only spent a few hours in the boots of the white-haired monster-hunter named Geralt but his world is an ensnaring one. Everything from crafting potions and adding to your bestiary to slaying the monsters and saving the townspeople (for a modest charge, of course) is rewarding and addictive, to say the least. The game's world has a strong sense of logic which is strangely refreshing; to harvest certain ingredients from a slain beast, the player must research the beast beforehand in order to learn what is truly valuable and what is just entrails. It might seem tedious to some but it makes sense to me and at the moment, I'm enjoying the change in pace.

    With that last bit being said, I'm afraid that is all I have for the time being. My wife and I are finishing packing our bags for our long roadtrip ahead and looking forward to the journey as well as the destination itself. I hope PAX is as much fun and memorable of an experience as GDC was and I'll be sure to share my tale when I get the chance!

Road to Animation

The other day, a friend of mine wrote on his blog about what got him into the animation field and thought it would be interesting to see what got other folks pursuing a career in animation. I know I don't get much traffic on my blog but felt I would share nonetheless, if anything to remind myself why I spent four years in college studying animation.

 
Some of my earliest memories of watching cartoons or other animation consist of watching an old VHS of the original Fantasia. I wore that tape and it's case out so badly for watching it day in and day out; the colors were beginning to fade, the tracking was horrible and the case was a beat-up piece of black plastic with no cover art and the clear sleeve halfway torn off but I loved all the same. Being a big fan of dinosaurs at the time (and still to an extent to this day), I always loved the "Rites of Spring;" it has to be one of my favorite segments of all time!

Like anyone else of my generation, I was raised on Disney movies; I remember going to see Aladdin in theaters and being afraid of the Cave of Wonders sand-tiger. I was a toddler and that's some pretty scary stuff when you're only about three years old! Beyond that, we had a few different VHS tapes: Robin Hood, Dumbo (another personal favorite when I was a kid), The Lion King, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and most likely a few more that I can't remember at the moment. It wasn't too much longer after that when I discovered the great wonderment of CG cartoons, namely ReBoot and Transformers: Beast War; they may not hold up nowadays but they were awesome back then! (Shame on my nerd-cred, but for the longest time I always thought Optimus Prime was always a gorilla, not an 18-wheeler)

 I dabbled around a bit with animation but nothing too major. Growing up watching other TV shows like KaBlam's "Prometheus and Bob" and "Life with Loopy," I tried doing some stop-motion with a couple of action figures and my parents video camera; I wish I still had the footage to be able to show.

It wasn't anything special (a five second short of Solid Snake drawing his gun from his holster, what can I say?) but would still be neat to take a look at now! Speaking of Metal Gear, I do remember playing the original MGS on my Playstation and thinking that the cinematics and the graphics were mindblowing and in my opinion, they still stand pretty well on their own today!

I was always interested in CG, stop-motion, and video games but I don't think I ever really thought of it as being a feasible goal. I didn't really start getting into doing anything close to computer animation until middle school or so and didn't even think about animating as a career until roughly midway through high school!
     Back in grade school, our woodshop classes were taken out a replaced by what the school corporation referred to as "modular workstations;" about every week or so, a student or team of two students would rotate to a different station and learn about different aspects of technology from robotics and construction technology to computer-aided drafting and CNC milling. My first day in the class, I was assigned to the AutoCAD station by myself with no more than a computer with the software on it and a three-inch binder with lesson plans and technical jargon; I dove in head first and loved it. What I was doing wasn't too technically demanding (I was basically creating 2D technical drawings of custom bricks and brackets) but something about understanding the software and creating something from nothing was invigorating!
     I kept taking different CAD classes throughout high school and that's when I discovered the joy of animating; viewers be warned, these were some of my very first animations when I didn't know a hell of a whole lot!

I'd like to think I've improved since then and hopefully anyone who has seen my most recent reel would agree. After high school, I went on to study animation in college; I learned a good deal about the various aspects of animation, met some truly great people that I hope to keep as life-long friends, and had some awesome experiences along the way. I'm still trying to get into the industry but I believe it's worth fighting for. To be able to work alongside some of the people I've met and become friends with in such a fascinating field would be nothing short of amazing. I really do hope to make it there someday.

That's my story (or most of it, at least) and I do think it helps to go back and really think about what got you interested in animation, it might just help you keep moving forward with your pursuits!