goodbye NTU - ADM

yes... today I officially moved out of NTU... It's quite sad, after spending there almost a year and having such a great time! I made awesome friends, met some great talents and learned a lot myself. A very productive year. I would recommend it to anyone who is currently pursuing a degree and not only in animation. You get in touch with lots of very interesting people with different cultures, perceptions, languages, behaviors, there is really a huge amount of different things involved in an exchange. Especially if you go to a place that can be very different from what one calls "home".

A lot of things have happened and I wanted to update you all.

I started my internship already 2 weeks ago, and I managed to finish my final Assignment 1 week ago... That was freaking crazy!!! I was already working on the internship but still had to work overnight on stuffs for school.. so I just managed to sleep 8 hours in over 80 hours of on mode. I was a walking zombie! I shouldn't have started another chapter in my life without having the last one closed... one just shouldn't go ahead of things, or else one has to do really unhealthy things. It was sickening... but eventually I finished all of them so here they come.


Digital Painting 2

For Digital Painting 2 my Assignment was to do a camera projection, since Martin Constable(my professor) wanted me to go beyond Photoshop. This piece was really fun to paint since I could be very loose and paint fast. I preferred to spend my time learning Nuke. I had no experience at all in it before doing this so it was quite a challenge. Now I feel comfortable with it and really like the program too. I got to play with as many nodes as I could and tried to learn the most out of this. I also learned a lot of the possibilities it brings but also about some limitations certain very fancy nodes have. Especially when messing around with semi-transparent layers due to the style of the painting...

Thanks a lot Martin for all you have taught me since Digital Painting 1, and for always challenging me in fun ways!


Character Animation 2

It was very nice to work with Junyi Lee and Ryan Tan on this, we all put a lot of time in our shots and had some very pleasant animating sessions.
The shots of this animation I did are now actually rendered(very fast though). But those will come in my next animation reel that is almost done, and this time, with music ;) 

I cannot publish a compilation of all the works we did this semester since the exercises with only the head with lipsync cannot be publicly shown. I don't know if you guys noticed but the old ones are not to be seen anymore either. It happened that the rig we got to do exercises with was not a publicly open one... So we had to remove all animations from the web. I'm sorry guys.

It was a really cool semester with Davide Benvenuti again as our mentor, he is a really good professor. He will never beautify what he sees, so his opinions will always be sincere. It may take some time to get used to hear a senior animator talking how bad our animations look like and all we have to fix, but that's the best way to learn in my opinion, especially for animation. I am very thankful I had the opportunity to be his student. Ringrazio il mio amico!


Pre-Production

Our(Daniel Lee and me) collaboration FYP project was presented last week to all the animation faculty in ADM. With a lot of concept art, character designs, models, techniques... There was a lot to show. and it was well received. We got the definitive green light. Hans Bacher also agreed to be our Mentor. We really look forward to work and learn a lot with him! You can check his Blog out. He has done quite some awesome stuff for many animated masterpieces, including a lot of very influential work for the Golden 90's of Disney, and has written the book Dream Worlds(for the ones who perhaps know about it). So we will try now our best to meet his high standards and expectations!

More to come in a future blog we are doing for the project in itself. We have to do that in order to keep both universities informed of our progress. We have already developed our pipeline, a step that was more complicated than usual since we won't be working on the same place for many months. So we actually have our Project folder Synced in our computers.


That was it... the last post of all the things I got to do in ADM. With this, chapter closed. Now to focus on our final student Shortfilm and for the next months most of all on my internship. That is by the way in Lucasfilm Singapore n_n I'll be an intern in the animated Feature department for the next 6 months. I can't really say much more about it, but I'm really enjoying it till now!

cheers,

santy.