Monday:
Class: Practical & Digital
Presented my clip from Eternal Sunshine and my explanation of how it was done. My analysis was correct except for the fact that I didn’t guess that they used a motion control (moco) camera. I would post the clip, but I can’t find it on YouTube or anywhere else. Assignment for next week: Create a storyboard for the clip.
Class: Animation 1.
Made a bouncing ball in XSI using the curve editor.
Tuesday:
Class: Story Process 1. New teacher this week, same teacher from my storytelling strategies class. I like having two story classes, one with all animation students and one with film, game, and audio also. The two classes cover different stuff, so it hasn’t been redundant yet. We explored the free screenwriting software Celtx. Assignment for next week: Start writing a screenplay using Celtx.
Class: Lighting & Texturing.
Practiced lighting a scene. Introduced to 3 point lighting. Assignment for next week: Light another scene.
Class: Storytelling Strategies.
Turned in our first draft of our childhood story assignment.
Wednesday:
Class: Modeling 1.
Worked with subdivision surfaces in Maya, which was really confusing. Then covered textures a bit. Assignment for next week: Keep working on hand model, but in polygons, not subdivs. Also look for tutorials on the web.
Class: Oral Communication for Media Arts.
Discussion about what makes a good speech. Watched speeches from Hitler and Obama. Assignment for next week: Come up with ideas for our informative speech.
Class: VFX & Compositing.
Worked with instancing vs. duplicating, and other techniques to reduce the number of polygons in a scene to speed up rendering. Assignment for next week: Take more pictures of environments to place CG objects in.
Thursday:
Class: History of Computer Graphics.
Watched some videos from the Computer History Museum.
Assignment: Watch this video
…and continue reading Droid Maker.
Class: Storytelling Strategies.
Got into groups, read our stories, and gave each other feedback. Looked at this article and talked about structure. Assignment: Final draft of childhood story. Eavesdrop on conversations and record a few pages of dialogue. Turn in brainstorm binder and observation notebook.
Friday:
No class.
