Rae Previews Her Animatic

Hi! This week I completed more of my animatic. I brought it into the studio and previewed it for Rich and some other animators for their thoughts and feedback. Overall they really liked the look and feel to it, but my timing and pacing still isn’t where it needs to be. I’m almost at the end of completely finishing my animatic, and moving on to the next stage of production. Once I figure out the last sequence I am going to go back and re time everything to fix the pacing, as well as to trim it a bit, cause I went a little overboard with the length. I’m getting a bit anxious to move on to the next stage, but I know that if I don’t take the time to fix any of the mistakes now, it will be a problem later on. While finishing my animatic, I've also started to do the final version of the opening shot for my film. It’s helping me develop a workflow for my shots, so I know what to do for each one. Hopefully by my next post the first shot will be done! Here is the updated layout for my opening pan shot, based off of the concept art and layout I posted last week.

-Rae

Rae Gets Perspective.

I’m almost done my animatic! I've been working on it for the past few weeks, and this week I showed it to Rich for him to review it. He gave me some really good ideas, and advice about which shots don't need to be there,  and how to make things clearer. It’s hard to see what doesn't work when you’ve seen it too many times, so it was nice to see it from a fresh perspective. There are a lot of things that need tweaking, and the timing needs to be fixed, but i’m almost ready to move onto the next step! I’ve already done a few backgrounds, and began planning out my layouts for each shot. It's a little overwhelming to think about how much needs to be done to finish it, but i'm having a lot of fun making it, and it's really cool seeing it sort of come together. Here is the concept art for my opening shot, and the layout that I did after, I'll have more to show next week!

-Rae 

Bendix Becomes Increasingly Canadian!

Hello again! 

This is my second to last blogpost. I only have one official week left here but I asked if I could come in for a few extra days as I'm still in Toronto a week after the internship is over, so maybe this is my third to last blogpost? I've grown to love the studio and the people here so much that I already know now that the trip home will be bittersweet.

This weekend we celebrated David and Kosta's birthday and the day after I went to my third life-drawing session ever! It was very relaxing to just focus on drawing whatever was before me and on all the technical stuff, rather than having to come up with an image in my mind first. In the evening Kris and I went swing dancing again and according to him, I'm doing really well! I'm going to believe what he says as he, in my mind, is a swing-dance-master. Just the fact that he can actually move and not trip over himself makes him a dance guru compared to me. 

We went out yesterday to play ping-pong and other table games and it ended up being an incredibly late evening but with tons of fun and good laughs, and speaking of laughs – Rich insisted on paying for my coffee a few days ago, but I'm really bad at letting people pay for me (despite that I had bought him a coffee months ago), so I slammed the money back in his palm. He said that it was very Canadian of me. 

Today I'm going to visit Cherry and stay over at her place for the entire weekend, and if all goes according to plan, we're going to have at least three food adventures, play Mass Effect and Bioshock and watch some horror movies! 

I've also hit a milestone for animation and I reached 21 seconds this week! It feels awesome to get faster and faster week by week and even more so to hear the reactions from the creators of the original show. They're always super positive and engaged and their enthusiasm for the movie is very contagious! 

And one last note: at the beginning of the week, the studio was used to film a few scenes for a tv-series with the smiley's working in the background, and now I can finally say: LOOK MA' I'M ON TELEVISION!

- Bendix 

Bendix Loves a Challenge!

Heyoo!

Monday Aramika and Aaron invited me to start exercising with them after lunch and it's incredible what a little bit of movement can do to boost your energy level! I feel weak compared to the others, but in two months I expect to be ripped like The Rock.

At work I've finished up one of the more complicated crowd shots, a fun and engaging challenge and now Rich, Cheery and I are at nitpicking level and we're putting the last sparkly finishes to the scene and then I got one more shot left to spice up. Next week will be a surprise as I have yet to find out what I will be doing!

I've also visited the AGO for the first time together with Aramika and Aaron and as Aramika is well-versed with the museum, she gave us a small tour while I plagued Aaron with my puns. We finished the evening off with beer and burgers at the bar across the street and on Sunday we'll possibly repeat the success and go out to one of the islands for a party.

Tomorrow I'm going to FanExpo with Pippa and her roommate, and I can't describe how excited I am! I love conventions and this one is HUGE compared to the danish conventions, and I know I'm going to end up spending hours in the artist alley and dealer hall.

Until next time!

• Bendix