Week 1

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[Abbreviated notes for the first day of class].
 
Due First Day of Class: class goals, picture of yourself, samples of your work.
Due Next week. Pendulum exercise plus rough blocking of cycle (key poses). A picture of yourself to aid my addled memory.
Just to star the semester off right, I wanted to run a few ground rules by everyone as well as help clarify goals. Not everyone’s goals are the same in each course, so please email, comment, post about what YOUR goals and interests about animation are. It’s useful to me as it helps me continue to tailor this course to you.
As this is a 2nd level course, I’m going to be focusing a LOT on weight mechanics, shot planning and workflow.  There will not be a lot of emphasis on facial subtleties, but rather on overall performance and pacing. I’d like to establish some ground rules for this course. There are a lot of critiques to get done in the allotted time and I’m going to be a stickler about a few things, else everyone suffers.
Put your work in the drop folder by the start of class.
Delays hold everyone up. If you’re going to be late, email me your assignment.  I try my best to give everyone a good crit during class, but sometimes time works agains me. I do bring work home to review and give additional critique when I can. assignments, so don’t put up a 200mb avi.  At the very least use cinepak or sorenson 3 compression. Ideally, use h.264 and playblast out 800x600. (to do this, hit playblast, go to the little box, under display size, use custom, type in 800x600 and verify your compression settings are reasonable.) If you have a site and your work posted, that’s fine too. Gmail will accept up to 20mb attachments if you email in your work.
Include your maya file. Save in .ma format, and reference your rig  into your scene.  This gives you around a 300k animation file and you can have more freedom to have  multiple versions. Place these all in a single folder with your name on it. (maya looks inside the folder for the textures
name your files:
lastname_first iniital_week #_title
i.e. coopermanj_w10_pendulum.ma
More Groundrules

• Can you work on a shot you’re doing in another class? No. This just makes a frustrating experience for both you and the other teacher. There’s a subjective element to critiquing animation, and too many cooks..
• Take on what you can handle. Keep within frame limits. Scale the complexity of your assignment to what you can manage in the allotted time. While I laude ambition, part of the job of an animator is to finish the work within a timeframe. Having something smaller in scale but on the road to finish is better than an animation that crashes to a halt, unfinished. You end up learning a lot about planning by working to completion.
• Don’t sit in the back of the class and mutter the whole class. That just drives me mad. Also, I tend to notice if you’re zoning out and scouring youtube.
• Have a backup. With dropbox, gmail, and the low cost of flash drives, there’s pretty much no excuse to forget your homework, at least, no excuse I’m usually willing to accept. If you have to miss class, email me in advance and send in your work by the following day for no grade penalty. (I have an extra gmail account I use just to send myself important files). 
• Class participation. This dedicated class blog is a new thing I’m trying out, but I’m counting posting and comments as class participation. Critiquing is a learned skill, and one that helps YOU improve your animation, as it forces you to really be clear about how and why an animation is working. It’s also a learned skill in how to talk to people in a respectful but critical way.

For those brave souls, feel free to introduce yourself with a blog post and post some of your work.