Rigging and Production Modeling

So a month or more has gone by. I spent it in Compositing Fundamentals (CFM) and Fundamentals of Animation (FOA).

I was alright at animation, but I found the class to be... less than exciting. We spent a lot of time talking about animation and not enough time doing it. The lab instructors were... friendly, but very unprofessional. The night classes said they kept falling asleep during their labs, and for us in the day classes, they got very frustrated very quickly and one went as far as to start physically doing the work for me - which is completely against everything this school is supposed to be for. I eventually told her I got it and that I could take it from there, and it still took some talking to convince her to let go of my stylus and let me do my work. Critique is one thing. Physically taking over work I should be doing in order to learn is something else. If you must do a demo, undo the work you did and let me try it myself. I won't learn just by watching you.

I was unimpressed, overall. I found 2DA to be more of a learning experience than FOA. I was much more engaged by compositing. The instructors were very relaxed, very straight-forward, and very capable and would explain rather than seize control of your projects. The podcasts were thorough. And the material was generally much more fun and interesting. Even rotoscoping was fun, though I know in an actual production setting, it's a boring, frustrating pain. But I grasped it pretty quickly and Nuke was an amazing program to work with. It had the ease of Photoshop with the logic of Maya. I would display my work, but it's all copyrighted material from movies, so I can't. :( I will say, however, that the color lecture we got was probably one of the most amazing ones we had. Pedro Flores is, simply put, one of the best to teach it. It was hard to translate physical traditional color theory into digital color theory. I was very sad to learn they used to do speedpaintings in compositing... that would have been an amazing, educational addition. I sketched a lot in class as it was, but it would have been nice to get professional guidance. And it would have worked in tandem with color theory. Either way, soon after we did the color theory lecture, I ended up painting this:

Easily one of my most coordinated colored pieces. I have a very, very, very hard time with color. I am not sure why. But this is a significant improvement, even as it is now.

Now I'm just waiting for grades for that month, and we've started Rigging Basics and Production Modeling. More below.