Class 5 over and 6 just started...

I haven't posted for quite a while for a few reasons. I've completed class 5 in the meantime with the old AM curriculum which was for me short film pre-production. Getting a story together so that in class 6 I can then animate it.

Class 5 was pretty amazing for me. My mentor was Jed Diffenderfer, he worked in Dreamworks on Kung Fu Panda (and many others) and showed us in class a lot of material from the character and story development process. He even put together an entire website with supporting material to complete the lectures and AM notes. He's totally awesome! Class 5 was my first encountering with 'story' and while I know to appreciate a good story and good story telling I never thought of myself as being a story teller. So this class was my first try on putting together my own little story and now in class 6 animating it.

Now class 6 started and I haven't prepared all my files and shots to ensure that for the start I can just focus on animating. Luckily I was recommended an open source Pipeline add on for Autodesk Maya openPipeline (http://openpipeline.cc/).

It bothers me a lot if my files and everything is messy so it was very important for me to know that I have an organized workflow that I can see through it easily and its flexible for updates and changes (knowing myself I will continue changing the set, the cameras, etc.). I've set up my project now with openPipeline and it really does the job great. There is even a tutorial by Peter Ruschel talking about using openPipeline for AM projects and especially for short film production. I really must drop by him and say thanks for the great tutorial...:)

That's all! Better start blocking now....