justin owens

I’m in the computer lab at school putting the final touches on my wushu animation. I need to work on my timing a bit, touch up some of my key poses and add in the facial expressions. After that I think I’ll be ready to start offsetting my keyframes. I have a bit of a back log of animations (2d and 3d) that I haven’t posted, I’m going to try and get those online in the next few days.

This weekend has been the first in some time where I’ve had two days off in a row, I feel like I’ve finally had some time to rest. During the week I always have two days off from work, but then of course I’m at school those days.

It’s tough, I really wish I wasn’t working at all so I could put all my energy into school, but I’m enjoying work so much, I’m getting to do lots of things I’m really interested in (baking, food prep and soon I’ll be getting training on the line). Bill keeps joking that Kimi and I will probably take over the Bread Workshop, that really caught me off guard. I’ve always had a dream of having a bakery/cafe/small restaurant. I’ve no idea what the future holds for me, and there’s no way I want to stop pursuing animation and art in general, but all of a sudden it seems like that dream has much more of a chance than I’d have thought. Interesting.

I have a lot of homework to get done today. YCON starts this weekend and lots of friends will be visiting. I’m starting with my 3d animation homework as I find it a lot easier to focus and get started on computer work.

I just ordered a new 24″ iMac, I’m looking forward to getting that setup. I had thought of getting a new tower instead, but the iMac includes a gorgeous monitor and has such a small footprint (I should be able to get rid of both my g5 tower and pc box), that I couldn’t resist. My work area at home isn’t ideal at the moment, I have the aforementioned two towers next to my desk, two keyboards and mice on my desk and it’s just too much. I can’t wait til it’s simplified, I think it’ll work much better for me.

I’ll still be using two monitors, so I won’t lose that functionality. I forgot to order the mini dvi to dvi adapter though, so I’ll drop by the apple store before school sometime this week.

Hmm, I had a lot to blog about … yesterday, but now it all seems so in the past. And forgotten. Mostly forgotten.

Between work and school, and the rare attempt to sleep inbetween, I’ve been keeping quite busy. I’m so incredibly excited by my classes this semester and feel that I’ll be leveling up by the end of the year.

In my advanced animation class we’re starting out with a martial arts routine. Last night we went over how to do the first pass blocking, I was surprised by how simple it ends up being. I feel like any complicated character animation is doable at this point, I just have to break it down into the most basic poses.

I turned in the falling leaf project in my intro to 2d animation class yesterday. I felt it ran a bit fast, but my teacher really liked it. The main focus of the animation was ease-in and ease-out, having the keyframes get closer and closer as the leaf comes into a curve and then the opposite as it leaves the curve. I had such a hard time finishing the animation. I kept wanting to wrap it up, but I’d have the leaf moving too fast and so I’d have to add another curve to try and slow it down.

 

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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.

 

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I’m just about done with finals week, I’m finishing up my perspective piece tonight (a three page comic) and then I’ll be done!

I turned in my animation project on Monday and got some nice feedback. It’s still far from finished, I unfortunately got way distracted by Lord of the Rings Online. I like where it’s going though and I’ll be finishing it up over the next week. In fact I’ll be working to have all the animations I did over this semester polished by June 30th, the deadline to submit demo reels for the Fall ‘08 Pixar Class.

 

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The premise for this animation is a businessman sits down at a park bench to eat his lunch, when he notices a group of pigeons watching him. He gets nervous and transfers to another bench, for a moment feeling safe, until he realizes there are even more birds in that area.

I have the first section blocked out, I need to add in the second bench section and then refine all the keys (as well as adding the pigeons and lunch box).