I caught Dreamwork’s How to Train Your Dragon last night. Despite some technical difficulties in the theater (the BG soundtrack only played at about 25% of the actual volume it was intended), I wholeheartedly enjoyed this film. The only two things I can think of that I’d wished were different were that I felt the character of Astrid was a bit underdeveloped and came to her conclusions waaay too quickly, and that I didn’t think the 3D actually took advantage of the grandeur of the great vistas it was showing (that last point, however, might once again be attributed to the lackluster theater I saw it in, it was kinda ghetto). The dragon was soooooo well animating, his design was at once endearing, cute and cuddly, and really dangerous and intimidating. Hiccup’s voice was perfect, and I really liked the relationship between him and his father, it felt very layered and real, like they were both rounded characters with their own flaws and hang ups having a really jilted interaction that led to avoidable complications….a very realistic father/son vibe, I felt.
I’m not generally a fan of Dreamwork’s films…they are a bit too pop-culture reference-y for me, and I’ve never been a great fan of their character designs, but this one really got me. It was, on all levels, pretty durn fantastic. I wants to see it again
On the school side of things…this quarter is gonna be pretty steadily busy the whole way through. For my 2D Character class I’m working on a dialogue acting piece which I’m using one of the gargoyles from Hunchback of Notre Dame for (I should have a pose-test done for that sometime soon, shall post the results of that once I do)
My Aesthetics of Animation class, taught by the Chair of the Animation Department, seems like its actually going to be very interesting and engaging….our final project for that class is to make a personal project exploring some aspect of animation we are interested in…right now I think I want to do something with 2D-Environment/Atmosphere….I’ve actually considered possibly exploring that dream I had when I was in Japan, it could yield some useful results for my thesis…
Finally, my Digital Cel Animation class, in which we are making a short film based on a children’s book written by a student here at SCAD. This week we were all asked to explore a different digital technique of translating the style of the book (ink and watercolor drawings) into digital animation means. Some people are making Flash puppets, some are coloring in Photoshop…I was asked to animate it in Flash and then print the inked animation, color it by hand and scan it back in. I used watercolor pencils and washes (similiar to the technique I used for my Rotoscoping Project, minus the inverted color), and here is the result:
embedded by Embedded Video
Just a VERY quick and shoddy walkcycle….it was my first attempt animating anything in Flash from scratch ever….surprisingly I think I took to it pretty easily. If anything else, it was fun to animate something with a bit more character to it rather than just demonstrations of animation principles like overlapping action x_X Speaking of characters, Hubert the Beagle is copyright of Nate Marsh, and quite a delightful little pooch he is too X)
Beyond animation-type things….I gotta make a couple big decisions here shortly, about living accommodations for next school year and what I will be doing with my summer vacation. Kinda deciding between a few big options, hopefully I’ll get some sort of sign about which direction I should follow >_>
Xposted from Nate's fancy blog, A Progress in Work....