Well, I thought it was about time to post again.  I am still pushing through with my Animation Mentor work.  I can’t believe it, but I am actually half way through class 4!  This is unbelievable that time has gone by so fast.  Class is really getting good now.  We are discussing a lot of film procedures and story telling elements.  We have now covered some camera cuts and discussed keeping continuity through the camera cuts.

I am currently working on a shot invovling two characters.  I am using an audio clip from Knocked-Up.  I am very excited about this piece as I believe it is going to give me a real challenge to create an entertaining (hopefully funny) shot while having to rely on subtle movements, and lots of upper body and facial animation as opposed to the broad full body animation I have been used to.

While I have been working on this primarily, I have been making sure to hang out with my lovely wife as much as possible and still help out with Imagitorium.  At this point for Imagitorium the animation is very minimal, so it has not been a ton of work for me so far.  It is at this point, that at times I wish I could help out the guys in modeling as that seems to be the focus of the work currently.  Oh well, my turn with animation will come soon enough, and from the way things look, I will be animating some very cool looking characters, which of course gets me super psyched!

Anyway, outside of all of this I have played around with simple animations, such as walk cycles.  I sometimes just need a short-term project to keep up my interest in everything else and I find little animation cycles to be quick and a lot of fun.  They are a great contrast to the long planning and story-telling that I am doing for the rest of my animation work.  Below you will find one of the cycles.  It is just a small little walk cycle I created with this roboter rig constructed by a guy who identifies himself as NoLeftovers from Highend3d.com.  The model was created by his friend, Aimbiz.  I just have to say thanks to these guys for creating such a nice rig for which us animators can play with.

[quicktime width="450" height="370"]http://jamescditmer.com/wordpress/wp-content/fgallery/animations/roboWalkSmall.mov[/quicktime]

*Other news (on the political side) is that we have a new president elect — Soon to be President Barack Obama.  I look forward to seeing the direction, we, the United States, now move toward.