New challenges

Hello my dear friends!

So the first year in Character Animation at The Animation Workshop ended and I had AN AWESOME TIME. I am so glad that I finally learnt to animate, I met so many grand and inspiring persons and now I feel more than motivated to improve my skills and handle some new projects. I already have some ideas for the next months: since the 2nd year will be mainly focused on learning 3D-animation with Maya, I give myself the task to do one 2D-animation per day. I will also push myself to learn Maya properly and model more characters with the software. I will try to handle a better life-drawing sketchbook and experiment more with color and texture...

BUT the most upcoming project for me will be taking place in Kathmandu from the 28th of June until the 28th of July: I have been asked to come to the International Buddhist Academy by my cousin Christian to paint different pictures representing buddhist philosophy and history, nepalese or tibetan landscapes, symbols... I am packing my things before flying to Nepal in less than 2 days: you can not imagine how excited I am... I will share my adventure soon.

Tip tip tip : Stay aware and opened to anything around you because inspiration is EVERYWHERE.

I wish everyone a great summer  :)

End-Year Exam

A year has passed at the Animation Workshop and to finish it we had a week of exam. One of assignments was to do five seconds of animation from the storyboard below. The Sultan wakes up suddenly after a fly introduced itself in his mouth. He panics and looks around, searching for the culprit. Lots of fun again to go through all the animation process. I really feel at ease with it and more inspired to push my limits and look for doing new animated performances.  

Thumbnailing

Rough Animation

Finished Animation

Interaction Animation

Lately I had the chance to be taught by Sydney Padua, another great figure in the animation world. She helped us to learn interaction in animation: we had to make two characters hug each other after a expression changing. Our characters were Hoghart from The Iron Giant and the Sultan from Aladdin.

 First of all here are some sheets where I practiced the characters in order to get use to their construction.

Then in order to have an idea of their relation, I posed them next to each other also to check the size relationship. 

Finally came the idea of an interaction. So I thumbnailed my animation in few key poses.

...and here is the animation I came up with. One more time it was a big challenge but I am very glad about the result.

Mister Stan

Two weeks ago at the Animation Workshop, we had the chance to collaborate with 4 directors/students from the french school La Poudrière. They needed our help to do animation tests for their projects which consisted in adapting children books into TV series. I worked under Jeremie's direction with my four classmates Ben, Sofia, Will and Agnete. 

For this animation above I worked with Agnete. I animated, cleant up and colored the dog, Mister Stan, while Agnete did the great animation of the neighbor. It was a real challenge to work with limited animation but also to apply the style of the book to animation. Moreover it was the first time we were working on a project we did not come up with so again, a nice challenge for adaptation. 

Thanks to La Poudrière's students for this great collaboration*

Charlotte, Jérémie, Clémence & Alix

LIGHTS OUT

Mesdames et Messieurs,

I am happy to present the result of a long journey me and my amazing 7 co-workers just ends :

here is our first animated short short film dedicated to 4 to 6 years old children (and older of course) made in 4 weeks. It was an amazing challenge and great adventure to go through. We all learnt a lot from each other and became stronger in terms of organisation, planning and production. I hope you will like it.

Coming Soon - Short Short Film "Lights Out" *

Dialogue Animation

"Mid Year Test" med Pink Panther

Half way through my first year at the Animation Workshop we had to pass a mid year exam as well as writing a reflexion about our experience in the school until now. This reflexion and the test went pretty well for me even though I got a little stressed by the short time we had to achieve it. We had to produce a small animation starring our dear Pink Panther catching a baseball and falling straight on the ground. I am joining to my animation the few preparation sketches I made before animating. 

Dance Animation with Mike Nguyen

Lately at the Animation Workshop, I have been taught by a grand man : Mike Nguyen. Mike was, among others, lead animator for the famous movie The Iron Giant. He also achieves lots of wonderful work as an animator in the industry since he graduated from CalARTS. I never had a teacher has good as him and not only thanks to his exciting career. Mike breaths happiness and his words carry harmony, emotions, life, peace, quietness... All of these reminders made me much closer to my true self. He taught me how to follow my emotions in my animation and across this new approach I reached another level of expression I've never attained before. Here is the dance animation I came with during the last week with Mike. It is still rough but I am extremely happy about the result. Something organic, almost real to my eyes, appeared to me. I was very productive during this last week so I post here some pages from my sketchbook.

Thank you Mike*

TV PAINT - suite

Here is our final assignment of the year at the Animation Workshop. We worked on TV Paint again with a frog and a fly as characters. We had 6 sec to make them interact ;).

TV PAINT

2012 is almost finished and for this last week before going back home (hellyeah) we have been introduced to this very cool program TV Paint! Thanks to our new teacher Rune Ryberg ( AWESOME ARTWORK THERE !) getting used to it was not such a big deal. Here is the result of 2 days of work : a little flying cycle starring "the owl" in Sleeping Beauty.