You can dust it off and try again
Dust yourself off and try again, try again
Cause if at first you don"t succeed
You can dust it off and try again
You can dust it off and try again, try again"
I know, way old Aaliyah lyrics, but hear me out. I'm graduating Saturday, and as many of us know, the road to employment can be long and difficult one. You send out your work to as many places as possible, hoping for just one yes, that foot in the door. Shooting for the top, I tried the major studios with little luck. I tried a couple video game studios I knew about and got close, darned close, but still no luck. I am happy to say that none of that got me down or made me want to stop. I just kept on it and now I am proud to say that I have an internship at Sony Pictures Imageworks in L.A. It's an eight week program, so we'll see how it goes. It doesn't start until mid June, so after all this hard work on my thesis (which I'll post in it's entirety once we're done trying the whole festival circuit thing), I'll actually get a chance to relax a bit before going nuts with work again.
I have talked to some of you about doing some tests for a video game company in Boston. It was two parts. The first shot would be a heavy character running at full speed and stopping with difficulty. The second was any sort of melee attack with it's hands or feet.
Stop:
Attack:
They liked what I did and gave me some critique asking me to submit a second run of the test. I reworked the second half of the stop animation and tweaked up the attack some.
Stop:
Attack:
In the end, I should have taken a step back from my thesis and given this the time it would have taken to really make it a lot better. I was too stuck in trying to get it done within the week and afraid of adding frames to actions. Lesson learned, don't be afraid to really push your frames around and add if you have to. The limitation of a set number of frames can be fun and good in terms of keeping your actions simple, but unless I'm going to basically restart from scratch, I should really just add in some frames if I need it and I'm able to.
What was their reaction to the stop animation? Did they ask for the toned down version, or was that a choice you made which seemed to pay off? I kind of liked the original run animation with the over exaggerated stop!
ReplyDeleteThe deal with the stop animation, which they rightfully pointed out was less about technically what I was doing, and more about the fact that he's proportionally top heavy, I was having him run with his chest first and crouched forward, yet when he stopped, he made this big move stretching out and the particular stop I was doing didn't match what I had set up in the run.
ReplyDeleteMy choices were to change the transition to work better, redo the run, or redo the stop. Even though it was the harder part of it all, I decided to redo the stop. The problem is, as you pointed out, I didn't go as far as I probably could have in really pushing that stop to be as heavy and extreme as I could be. For instance, he could slide a bit more, go forward more, have a bigger take before he goes down, and I should really milk the difficulty he has getting stopped and settled.