Monthly Archives: September 2008

September 16, 2008

Thirty To Go

By jay

Thirty minutes before I’m off for my pastry and break baking shift. I am exhausted. It’s not so bad at all when I’m moving around, but now that I’m just sitting and waiting, the exhaustion has set in. I’ve just about been up for 24 hours, which is rather rare for me, I typically can’t go that long without sleep. I’m confident though that once I’m moving and out in the crisp air, I’ll wake up again.

On top of everything else I feel emotionally drained. It’s been a long day. I look forward to sleep, only five and a half hours to go and I can lay down!

I’m doing decently on the homework front. I finished my figure drawing homework earlier, that felt nice to get out of the way. I’ve a few supplies I need to pick up before class, but I otherwise feel ready. The only homework item left is for my 2d animation class. We’re doing a falling leaf animation this week. I need to finalize my background layer and path of action for the leaf and then onto animating it. After work I’ll sleep, then I’ll head to the animation lab to get that all finished. I hope it won’t take more than a few hours.

Wednesday evening I need to check in with the court house and see if I need to report for jury duty on Thursday. I decided to not try and get out of it this time (I know a few tricks). I feel ready to finally give it a go, but the downside is that my initial report in date is a school day. Because of that, I’m hoping I don’t have to report in, at least on Thursday. I only have each class once a week, so missing a single day cuts out a lot of instruction.

And now fifteen minutes have passed. Time to brush my teeth and put myself together. I feel the pastries calling me!

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September 15, 2008

The Bake Shift

By jay

I’m working the bake shift this evening/morning, Tues from 4am to 8am. It’s going to add up to a long day, but I’m excited to be baking pastries!

I’m working at getting some homework done at the moment. I’ve been pretty busy this weekend and hadn’t really gotten a chance to get much done in that department. On Saturday I helped cater for a wedding, that was a lot of fun, I hope to post about that specifically in the next few days. On Sunday maiki and I took a nice walk around Berkeley, sampling many treats along the way. Much conversation was had.

I had a simple exercise to do for my Advanced Animation 2 class, a basic ball (of the heavy variety) bouncing in place and coming to a stop, using the techniques learned in the last class. I did it pretty much as he wanted, but in the end I opened the graph editor and adjusted the curves so the ball had more apparent weight. Specifically, I broke the tangets of the curves to make the adjustments I wanted, though that wasn’t something he showed us. He had mentioned that technique can lead to problems when scaling an animation, but I didn’t really know of another way to get the same effect, without overloading on keyframes.
[display_podcast]

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September 9, 2008

Back In Blog

By jay

Well I’ve been MIA for a while. Yo, welcome back.

I started back to school last Thursday, I had my Intro to 2d animation and my 3d animation (advanced animation 2). Both my instructors are very inspiring, I’m really excited by both classes.

I went in to the 2d animation lab after work this evening and did my homework. I had two pieces to get ready for this friday. The first is a circle bouncing in profile, the second is a circle bouncing in perspective. It was a really interesting process.

I sat myself at an animation table and set my paper into the peg bar. On my first sheet of paper I did a rough of the whole animation. That included the background and all the main key poses I knew I’d need. I pretty much use that as a template that I can reference back to (I keep it under all my other sheets, with a flip of the light switch, I can see it decently).

I found that I could only see through about 8 sheets of paper (to see through to my reference sheet). I ended up needing to cycle out the older frames, to be able to use my reference. I really just let go and animated one frame at a time. Meaning I didn’t think about it too hard and tried to let it flow. I knew this first pass wasn’t going to be perfect, that wasn’t my goal, but instead to get familiar with the process. Success!

I look forward to doing more!

justin_o_ballprofile_tk01_sm.mov

justin_o_ballperspective_tk01_sm.mov

I’m trying out the WordPress media uploader for these videos. A test to see if I shall use it in the future.

1 comment   |  tags: , , | posted in Art, Journal