Sack, Sack and more Sacks….

I challenged my class at CCA to take a piece of music and animate flour sacks to it… If they wanted to they could also pick a favorite sequence from a film they love and animate it with flour sacks. The purpose of the assignment is to explore staging, acting, cutting and most of all, Straight Ahead style animation. Here are a few of the Sack tests the students did…

Great job to everyone! Expect the other students films soon.

Note: These will play from Safari but need to be downloaded on Firefox

Daniel Gonzales
Nadan Pines
Kyuhee Lee
Bessie Chiu
Grey Jenkins

The Virgin Voyage

We never did post the final version of the project we did last semester. Here it is. It does not have alot of the sound effects or Music yet. Scott and I think the students did a great job!

All the students in our class are extremely talented. Alot of them are out on the job hunt. Maybe someone out there needs some animators… Feel free to contact us regarding any of the work and we will put you in touch with the student or students who did the work. You can email us at gordo@splinedoctors.com or clark@splinedoctors.com

Link to Virgin Voyage

(remember to right click in safari. It may come in as a text file.)
if it does download as a text file, remove the .txt from the end of the file and it should play fine in quicktime.

Pixar 2 Student Work, Fall ‘06

I’d like to post some of the student work from last semester’s Pixar 2 class. Most of these clips are from our 2-person dialogue assignment and the other is from an assignment we called “Subtext From a Hat”. This involved giving each student an original line of dialogue. We then had them draw a slip of paper from a hat that had some sort of emotion or character trait on it for the subtext of the perfomance. Here are some of the assignments we thought were particularly successful. We’re proud of all our students and their efforts. Hope you enjoy these clips.

-Adam

Ben Kerr
Curran Giddens
Julie Choi
Chris Turner

The Virgin Voyage coming soon

We did a cool new short film in the 3rd level Pixar class. Its called: The Virgin Voyage. Here are some images of the characters and a short clip of some of the animation. Basically, we recorded some improv actors and built a story around it. It was a really fun excercize and we hope to get the whole thing up and rendered soon.

Improvimation

I wanted to talk a bit about what we are doing at the Academy this semester. This semester, Scott Clark and I recorded 4 improv actors doing random scenes. We then picked the best one out of 20 or so skits and are animating to it. The students are in charge of every aspect of the process. We started by doing visual development. Then tasks were assigned to each student. Some Model, Some are doing layout etc… We have cast out the scenes and the students are beginning animation. Each of them will have a chunk of very juicy shots to animate. The dialogue they are animating to is full of great stuff. It give them the opportunity to animate something original with interesting characters. Granted, the story is improvised, so it aint Bambi but its good and alot can be learned. Scott Clark coined the term “Improvimation” I think its a great way to generate content, especially on the student level. Alot of the time, students take dialogue clips from movies. Unless they are done really well, most of them are lack luster. Expect to see the final film at the end of the semester.

The image is of one of our characters “The Captain” It is a skit involving three characters.

-Andrew