Doing the thing

Okay so another small victory. Honestly, I'm just glad I've made it this far.

This is just a very simple, blocking thingy. Obviously no smooth animation. And I did use reference, but didn't really want to watch myself in the playblast. For this, being my first real time sitting down and animating by myself, I really just played and practiced setting keyframes really just to see if I could do it. I just moved limbs and keyframed them. I'm not being super critical or careful in making a super amazing blocking pass/animation. I'm just laying it down. And honestly, I don't expect to make anything amazing or even decent this summer. This is the time for me to learn and mess up a bunch.

Like this is kind of a big deal to me being outside of the classroom. I know that I'm capable of being self-disciplined and able to teach myself new software. I did that all the time in high school just for fun. But as I had described in my past few posts, I've been encountering that motivation/discouragement problem (and the anxiety of running out of time). And I don't know, I like to be able to show that I pushed through the frustration. Like I said, it's the little things.

Now as for the animating itself, I must say, I'm already loving it. I find it so tedious but really fun. I mean, I already knew I enjoyed animating especially in my experience with using riggers like DuIK. But 3D is different. I find the mindset similar to DuIK but far more complex. (obviously because it's 3 dimensional).

I'm already making note in my head of things I want to pay closer attention to when I'm going in and animating. I can see how each pose is going to take a lot more time and care than what I did for this. (again, I'm still so used to the speediness of AE). But all the same principles apply. I'm seeing all the things I've been learning coming together and it's so exciting!

Now that I've gotten over that hump, I feel like I can really get into it. I've got my rigs and my pickers set up and I understand what I'm doing so much better.

My goal is still to have a reel by the end of this year. That way I'll have something for the career fair or at least a kind of pre-reel. I'm sure I'll have more to add at the end of January.

***I’m putting these in gif form so they’re a little more blog-friendly. When I make something finished, I’ll put make it a video***