Invaluable Notes

This comes from a guy who has been in Animation industry for quite a long time and writes regularly about storyboarding, film making and art on his Blog. One of the greatest resource for knowledge. Here is one of the most important note I read on his Blog. Oh his name is Mark Kennedy.

This is so true!

"Simplicity is a wonderful thing and I believe simplicity lies at the heart of making something appealing. The ironic thing is how hard it is to be simple. We resist it because it seems too easy, that nobody will like our work unless we smother it in layers of complexity, and that way if it's bad, at least nobody will be able to tell because they won't be able to penetrate all of our layers of complexity!"

excerpt from his post Splashing Around.

Invaluable Notes

I have decided to post some thoughts and notes I read/hear which I feel are invaluable and will help me improve myself a lot. Hopefully it will also help other people.

I was watching Ratatouille bonus features. There was an interview with an American chef Thomas Keller. Following is a paraphrase of what he said in one of the scenes.

"It is not about the perfection, it is about the quest for perfection."

So true and ironic.

Character Design for a Project

For the 3d-character setup project we had to design a character for following projects. This is what I came up with. I had some other designs too and it was confusing. But finally I decided to go with this. I may model and rig other characters later on. The hair in the side view is not drawn well, I had a hard time visualizing it. I am currently working on modeling of this character. I will post some 3d work once I have progressed well.

Back to Cooking

After I watched Ratatouille, I got my spirit for cooking back. I was thinking to make "bhaji" (an Indian dish with mashed veggies) for some time. So finally just yesterday I cooked it. It might not be the tasty one you find in famous food places in India, but it was tasty for me :)

First Animatic

This is an animatic I made for my Motion Studies class at SCAD. We were given different scenarios in the story and we had to create an animatic for that story. This did not come out as good as I had wished. Especially in the beginning size of the character is changing weirdly. And the end is almost abrupt. I could have added more details in the end. Rendering is not good in some frames too. But yeah i had enjoyed the assignment.

Can you guess what could be the story scenario? :) Thanks for watching.

Ratatouille

I wanted to watch this movie on DVD since I missed it in the theaters. Fortunately our college organized the show for this movie in the college's theater yesterday. So I could watch this movie in theater. I was expecting high quality visuals and a quality story from this movie. And I was not disappointed. From the first scene of the movie I was so impressed by the feel of the visuals and the details. It was realistic but not photo-realistic. I liked that a lot. The whole environment of the city was very immersive for the story. Apart from that I enjoyed this movie so much because I love cooking. And it was amazing watching all the different kinds of ingredients and different items being cooked. I loved the humor so much. I was laughing throughout the movie. Even subtle movements had so much humor.

It was kind of difficult for me to decide what to enjoy in the movie. Being a cooking lover I was lost in the kitchen world and I was also impressed with animations. At the end of the movie I felt like cooking something new. In a way I was happy that I saw this movie since I got my interest back in cooking. I was getting lazy at cooking in my break time. But that passion is back for cooking. Also it was good to see one of the best animations to make my inner desires of animation making come out more. Thanks to Pixar for making such a great movie.