The World Champion of Fail. - by JB

You guys are in luck - I found some movie files from the very first game I worked on...WCW Backstage Assault for the Playstation, and N64. This was done at Kodiak Interactive in Salt Lake City from 1999-2000, and I think we were just finishing it up when Nigel came to work with us. It was also me who hounded Nigel to come work at Kodiak, and Thor and I begged the company to hire him. Check out the post under this one to see what he got to work on after he FINALLY got into the USA (that's an adventure he needs to tell...it's a good one). The company closed like a year after he joined, so take that, Nigel! Leave a steady gig in Montreal to come be unemployed in the USA! So here we are, ten years later and he's still in Salt Lake City. Sure, he had a short stint in California thia summer, but he REALLY REALLY loves Utah for some reason.

Okay, back to my crappy animation. So when I joined Kodiak I was fresh out of college with my diploma in Classical (2D) Animation. Obviously I wasn't good enough to get a job at a place like Disney or Dreamworks, so when I was asked to interview with a games studio I was like 'Okay, I guess I like to play games...they must be fun to make, right?' Plus I would get to learn 3D on the job, so what the hell. So I got the job at Kodiak (after I BOMBED an interview with EA in the UK, but I didn't want to work there, anyway. That interview day is a good story, so remind me to tell it in another post) and my first day they basically go 'well here's your computer - have fun.' Huh? I guess I have to learn Maya as I go, then. I tried to find the very first animation I did there, but I must have destroyed it...for good reason, too, it was two wrestlers that were supposed to do something like clothesline each other, but it ended up looking like two peg-legged pirates having seizures underwater. It was so stiff and floaty, but I bet it would look hilarious now.

Eventually I learned enough to actually do my job and spent the next 8 months cleaning up mocap, with the occasional hand-keyed animation for moves that they either forgot to capture or something extra that the designers needed. I have an example of my best hand-keyed animation later on in this post. Here's a short montage of some of the stuff I got to clean up that year - the guy who looks like he's in convulsions is actually supposed to be getting electrocuted. Make sure to take note of how I show Bill Goldberg's signature entrance from the worst camera angle ever. That's how I roll. See, this wrestling game was EXTREME! Wrestling ring? Fuck that! Wrestling fans don't want no weak-ass wrestling ring - they want to wrestle in the fucking parking lot! Yeah that's right, I worked on a wrestling game that had no ring. As I recall, the publisher made this decision with like 4 months to go in the schedule. Awesome.

Here's where I body slam the principles of animation, suplex timing, leg drop weight, and camel clutch arcs and overlapping action!!

WCW BSA from John B on Vimeo.

This one still makes me laugh. The little dance he does in the middle of the attack is awesome.

lolpunch from John B on Vimeo.

Here it is, one of my aweome hand-keyed wrestling animations. Fuck, it's incredible. I might put it on my reel even now.

amazing from John B on Vimeo.

So that was my first game - after that one shipped, I got put on a baseball game...you guessed it, more mocap. After about a year on that, the publisher yanked it from Kodiak and decided that they wanted to finish it in-house. I guess that was the straw that broke the camel's back, because the studio closed a month or two later. I'm actually pretty thankful, in retrospect. If you work with mocap for too long, it's easy to get into a comfortable groove and after a while you kind of forget what it's like to have to plan out an animation, then act it out, keyframe it, muck with the timing, fix the floatiness, and then make it 'yours' from start to finish. You know, the whole reason I got into animation in the first place.

BONUS!!

I found the reel I had to make after Kodiak closed. Nigel and I stayed late in the studio rendering our shit out and then learning how to use Adobe Premiere, while at the same time cursing it for crashing every 5 seconds. The reel is like way too long, and it's a fucking disgrace. The audio track is way loud for some reason, and it's some awful Powerman 5000 song so you may want to mute your speakers for it. It's all cleaned up mocap with some of my college work tacked on to the end.

JB Reel 2001 from John B on Vimeo.

I ended up going to Treyarch a month or so after Kodiak closed and got to work on the Minority Report game - yet another project that got completely scrapped and redesigned with six months to go in the production cycle. I got to learn how to animate in 3Ds Max for that one - the old school Max with Character Studio and no graph editor. It was a battle, and I ended up quitting after less than a year and going to Bungie to work on the Halo series. Here's a reel I found from the Treyarch days...I'm guessing this is mid-2002 or so?

JB Reel 2002 from John B on Vimeo.

I hate watching my stuff. I think it's all shit and every video I see from Gobelins makes me want to quit animation and go home and overdose.

Happy animating, everyone!

JB

BLAST FROM THE PAST: PS2 Monsters Inc Animation circa 1999-2000

Back in 1999 I went to Utah to work on a PS2 game for the movie Monsters Inc. After a year of working in mocrap right after 3 years of 2D animation I had no goddamn clue how to actually animate. Nobody knew Maya at the time, Softimage was the only thing being taught at most of the schools back in Canada and yet the whole damn industry was using it and studios were desperate for people who knew Maya. Blah blah blah. So I took this gig, learned Maya enough by doing the stupid flaming bouncing ball/build a spaceship maya learning book shit and then I was given actual game animation to do. I forget how long it took me to do the moveset for Mike, maybe like two weeks to a month. It went fast because hey, it's short animation and Mike is just a ball with arms and legs.

So here we go...

Here's a 1 sec Mike talking animation. Weaksauce.

Here's another one. Twinning? What's that? MAMAMIA! DA PIZZA IZ NOTTA COOKED!

The next animation is....the bane of my very existence. When I die and my life flashes before my eyes, I will see this pattern: "1, 2, 3, I don't know!!" Why? Because I saw it 4 billion times. Why? because out of ALL the animations to test the engine with the characters, they chose this piece of shit. So for MONTHS.....MONTHS!!!!#$@%$%!%!!!!! our stupid programmers would show progress with the engine for hours and there in the middle of the level, the only character visible would be Mike doing this animation OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER. There is a knife to my nuts when I see this clip. A knife. So I can cut off my balls so I will never have children who can grow up and one day will searching through my files and be like "Oh what's this? It's in daddy's files...hmm...OMFG...that's terrible! Make it stop!!" Why am I keeping this? Just in case my friends. Just in case the US government captures some high level terrorist and needs more creative torture devices, they can give me a call and I'll gladly send them this animation. "1, 2, 3, what's Al Qaeda?"

Here's Mike's walk. I referenced this from a motion test they did early on, which, besides the teaser trailer, was ALL the reference we had to go on for the game, animation wise. Overlap? what's that? Give me a break, I came from mocap and 2D. This was like my 3rd week in Maya.

No comment on this one...

Here's a character I loved but never got used in the game. I think his name was Muscle. Here he is "talking". Before you watch it, call the family over and have them drag some chairs around the ol' magic box. This is animation for the ages:

Ah, Roz. Roz barely moved in the movie. So, my animations were so weaksauce I barely made the thing move. Here is her "Big thing" animation. I hope this animation never gets found by aliens 2432 years from now when they are on some archaeological dig on this planet.

"I don't get it? Why are my arms moving like they are swimming in kool aid?.."

Back in college, sleep deprived and insane on caffeine, we used to mock act like animated characters, y'know with insane overlap, anticipation, breaking joints, when OBVIOUSLY we don't move like that in real life. We used to get up and go to the bathroom at Coffeetime donuts and anticipate the door handle and so on..laughing cause it's funny from an animation nerd point of view. The staff at Coffeetime obviously gave us weird looks. Y'know..sometimes, animation needs to calm the fuck down with it's principles. Case in point..all Sulley had to do here was pull the lever. But since it was seen from the back in game play, I did this:

Look what the Illusion Of Life did to me! This is the most ridiculously over animated thing I have ever done. I'm fucking speechless. The shame. If that clip was shown at my funeral, I would love to die again.

HUHH??!! WHAT'S THAT?!! Oh just bad animation. Plus the slowest recovery E-V-E-R.

Couldn't resist adding music when I saw this one again after all these years. Timing doesn't match, but what the hell was I doing when I animated this?

What I liked in retrospect:

Learning Maya, A job that took me away from mocap.

What I don't like in retrospect:

I thought Ik arms were awesome for everything.

Conclusion:

More embarassment from this game to come...

Anger Management

So apparently looking back at my golden years as a dreamy eyed college kid. I can conclude a couple of things;

1) I had absolutely no ability or talent

2) My parents were wise in not investing a dime into my education.

3) I had some serious issues that needed be vented in the form of violent animation.

Actually I can't take credit for the story (which isn't the worst part of the whole thing and maybe not even half bad). But this is a great example of why you shouldn't model and rig your own characters if you don't know how to model, rig or animate. And if you are going to take on this set up for disaster then don't use 3DSMax's Character Studio. Actually I don't know if its any better now but just in case, just get someone that knows what they're doing. The only wise move I made in modeling and rigging these crows was that all three were the same rig with different heads. I didn't even bother making the heads a part of the body mesh. So you can see the glory that is a head intersecting through the body of a character. This isn't the only parts of geometry intersecting. See if you can spot them all! Take a look at the animation of the crows (which I was responsible for) and observe the complete lack of principles of animation. Another reason why this is a great learning tool for noobs. I also still had no idea what a pose was. (Though I happened to be a pretty good "poser"! Har har har!)

I won't dissect every performance in here as that would be very painful for all of us. Just know a gesture for every single phrase in a dialogue, not a good idea. Watch in particular 0:42-0:49. The words "Hey" "There's A" "Scared". This crow has some serious muscular spasm issues. And apparently the other two are completely dense or even deaf because he's having to sign out every word.



What I like:
Nothing like getting sharted on. Especially when it runs into your mouth. At the time this was also a very great technical achievement for the team. We were proud. Plus this probably leaves the same after taste that this film provides.


What I dislike:

Meh, the violence is...ok I guess. It would have been better if each crow blew up in a stock video poorly composite way ala Rambo. There also was only one karate kick in this whole thing.

Lastly I was expecting my 4 year old son to laugh at the part in the image above. He didn't he just said it was bad. So I sent him to his room without dinner. What does he know...I should tell him he was an accident...

In Conclusion:

Are shorts fun! Yessiry! Do you learn a whole bunch? You bet son. Should you at least know the principles of animation before you begin such an adventure? Well maybe that's all a part of the learning but boy this short could have definitely benefited from a little bit of basics.

Even Spike and Mike weren't sick or twisted enough to accept this into their festival. We submitted and never heard a word back.

Violence is NOT the answer.

Well it's an honor to get an invite to this blog after watching from the bleachers and itching to share my own experiences. Its especially honorable considering Nigel was the one that officially told me I knew absolute crap about animation when I got out of college. I’m pretty sure he invited me so he could feel better about himself. I would have killed to have the animations these whiny crybabies posted on here. I hope you douches have a good laugh.

So a bit of a back story….when I was in college I thought I was the bees knees. I had no idea it was my animation was a steaming pile. I never got any solid crits on my stuff through college and I even went on to win "Best Portfolio" of my graduating class. So I packed a duffel bag full of VHS tapes and headed off to Siggraph in LA (this was pre 9/11, I couldn't get away with that today) to throw my 50 some copies of turd in a plastic case to anyone that was hiring. Blowing all the money I saved living in my father-in-law's basement not only did I fund this waste of time but I also bought a hand held camera so I could force seasoned pros a live on the spot viewing of my gem of a reel. All I got were a few "Well, Good Luck!" "That's great!" "Wow! Its long!" It was like I was the kid that had a giant booger hanging out of my nose but nobody wanted to tell me because they'd feel bad. Or the reason why girls didn't want to date me in high school was because I always smelled like Indian food...

So this is the glorious excrement that resulted from my brilliant education and complete lack of ability:

So after my LA trip I remember asking one of my stellar profs, why the industry thought I sucked but I was still "King Demo Reel". The reply:

"My job is to get you out of this class not necessarily to get you a job."

Thanks admissons. Can I have my 70K back?

Wondering why I wasn't offered a six figured deal when I returned and even the Midway A.D. who showed interest in my full color resume wouldn't return my calls I finally posted my reel on CG-Char. You can still find the post HERE

What Nigel told me was that I had no idea what animation was or what I was doing. He used terms that were completely foreign to me: arcs, secondary, inbetweens, poses, balance, skills. I suppose to my credit I had never used a blasted graph editor of any kind. At the Art Institute of Colorado we used 3DS Max and learned to rig and animate with Character Studio which at the time used TCB instead of Euler. (probably half of you don’t know what that means) Also the rigs were IK and FK blending rigs hat you needed to key "plants" on both hands and feet when you wanted the IK to take over. Needless to say Nigel pointed out that I sucked and that baby I was about to have was going to starve unless I decided to give up on looking for a character animation job and just get what job I could. (Which turned out to be Best Buy.)

So what did I do with my new words o’ wisdom from Nigel the Great? This:

Changed the shirt color. Oh ok I also took out the horrible intro whatever the hell that was and made some new animations. A TON of new animations. I replaced the shots from my short films (the ones with the crows and that horrible purple thing that is supposed to be a toothfairy) with….you guessed it VIOLENCE. Sword swinging, ass kicking, body slamming, Jackie Chan shit!

Oh and I also changed the angle on Pete the Pirate. Like that made his performance look less crappy. Actually now that I look at it again I’m not sure what the hell I fixed….OH! The background is blue in the new one. Ok well that does make it better. The best improvement was ending the second reel with the dude SHOOTING the monitor. Yep more violence. Did it get me out of Best Buy? You bet your ass it didn't! But luckily I had interned at a theater advertisement company where I began to think I was the chosen one at the company for character animation. We'll save those animations for another day....

Also the irony in my delusions of grandeur were that I had always wanted to work on the next Shrek because that’s the movie that got this ride started for me. But all my reel showcased was a bunch of fugly demons, a giant satan with a spiky Q-Tip, and violence. Glorious violence.

What I Like:

The blatant lie right from the start:

What I dislike:

Not enough violence.

In conclusion:

Learn how to character animate before you throw the words “Character Animator” in shiny chrome text onto your reel. Oh and listen to Nigel.

***BONUS JUST FOR THE KIDS!**

HEY KIDS! Here's a fun little drinking game you can play. Take both demo reels and play them back to back and let em loop forever! Now! Take a shot every and any time you see a random act of violence!

WAIT! There's more!

Can you spot how many geometry intersections there are?

How about horrible poses? (this makes for a great drinking game too!)

Bonus for the lad that spots the shadow cut in half on the floor!

Rejection Letters from Days of Olde... - by JB

Just a quick one from me today. I was going through my email the other day and found an old folder called 'rejection letters'. Back in 2001 after the place Nigel and I were at closed, we basically had like 3 days to scrape a reel together and send it out to everyone we could. This is also back when Adobe Premiere sucked a lot worse than it does now and it took like 4 hours to encode anything, so we were both at work reeeeal late a few nights editing our stuff. I guess I saved some of these emails to look back on in the future and remind myself that I suck and that nobody wants me.

I have a bunch from studios that never got back to me after I sent my work, but those are all 'we'll get back to you after we review this', then I hear nothing. But those aren't worth posting because they're boring form letters. So here we go - these are from December 2001, and I ended up going to work at Treyarch in LA for a year on the Minority Report video game....yeeeeah :/ Then I went to Bungie for 5 years to work on the Halo franchise, now I'm at Blizzard on the Warcraft team so all in all I guess these rejection letters were a good thing.

These will probably be pretty dull to everyone, but I like sharing old stuff.

LETTER ONE - 2015 Studios

From: xxxxx@2015.com
Subject: 2015-Your resume
Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 17:56:50 -0600

Thank-you for applying, John. You have some excellent 2D work, however you do not have sufficient 3D work to make a judgment. Do you have more 3D work, or would you be willing to make a test? I will not be back in the office till the 3rd. I will contact you in the new year. Talk with you soon.


This is weird because I sent them an animation reel. Granted it was full of WCW wrestling and some baseball animations, which were hard to pick any good hand keyed moves from since the games were 99.9% mocap. I had also literally learned 3D animation the year before, so I bet my reel was so fucking shitty. I'll see if I can dig it up for another post. Oh, I think I did send more stuff, but never heard back. Might be a good thing, because they're in Tulsa, OK.

LETTER TWO - Microsoft

Subject: Thank you for your interest in Microsoft
Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2001 12:34:14 -0800
From: xxxxxx@microsoft.com

Hello John,
Thanks for attending our Open House on Dec. 13th. It was a pleasure to meet you. At this time, it doesn't look like we have any current positions that meet your skill set. This may change after the holidays, I'll keep your resume and contact you with any possible opportunities. You are always welcome to contact me with questions or updates in your location. Happy Holidays to you!

Hey John, you suck! Happy Holidays to you and go fuck yourself!

LETTER THREE - Blizzard Cinematics

From: xxxxxx@blizzard.com
Subject: Cinematic Animator
Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2002 16:11:47 -0800

Hello John,

Thanks for sending us the additional 3D/2D work, and for your interest in our Cinematic Animator position. Unfortunately, our Cinematics team's current goals are not a perfect match for your skills (they are looking for someone with a very broad range of high-res 3D experience). However, I would like to keep your materials on file in the event of future employment opportunities at Blizzard.

Thanks again, and best regards,

Do I even need to explain this one? What the hell was I thinking sending my stuff there at that time? They must have watched it once, slowly taken the cd out of the tray, and then flung it as hard as they could against the closest wall. 'Our current goals are not a perfect match for your skills' = 'We want out stuff to look good, and you being here would make it look like shit.'

...and finally...

LETTER FOUR - Bungie

Sent: Tuesday, July 16, 2002 3:41 PM
Subject: RE: checkit

Hi John,

Thanks for taking the time to send in your updated animations. We reviewed the changes you made, however we feel that your skills won’t make a good fit for our team at this time. But thanks again for your interest in Bungie and good luck with your professional efforts.

Yes, it took me two or three times to get into Bungie. Nathan went there after Kodiak shut down (he worked with Nigel and I), and for as much shit as we give him I'm pretty sure I owe him that job. I was working on that Minority Report game, and it was about as fun as it sounds, and I saw that Bungie had an opening for an animator. So I send my reel at the time and get asked to do a test...(I think I still have that test somewhere, too. I bet it's shit.) Then they ask for some revisions, and I get the above letter. Fuck. So I spend the next six months in absolute hell finishing Minority Report, all the while with an absessed tooth because I couldn't afford to get it fixed because I was living in Santa Monica on not a lot of money (picture being stabbed in the temple all day - that's what it felt like). So December rolls around and they still haven't filled the animator position up there, so I figure what the hell and apply again. I get more revisions and end up getting the job, but my guess is it was mostly Nathan going to bat for me that got me up there, so thanks guy! Unless you didn't want me to get hired, in which case you suck!

Anyway, there's more JB history on why I suck at animation and should have probably been a mechanic. One special day I will scan and post my rejection letters from my second year of college. Every summer, animation studios in Toronto would poach the animators from our college as cheap labor under the guise of 'valuable industry experience'. Basically they would hire the students for the summer and pay them shit, but we didn't care - INDUSTRY CONTACTS AND EXPERIENCE OMG. Well I applied to two studios and got two rejection letters that summer. Awesome. Disney Toronto picked a guy who copied his test out of an art book over me, and Nelvana just straight up passed. Yeah, Nelvana - makers of every shitty children's cartoon in the world thought I was too shitty for them. So I ended up working in a movie theater that summer and getting really fat. Ahhhh, college.

JB

BLAST FROM THE PAST: My Bungie test from 2003

Waaay back in February of 2003 I was looking to leave the company I was at so I could get:

1. Mo'money

2. Green Card

After being urged by my buddy JB and Thor, I applied to Bungie. I was given a test to do at the WORST possible time as we were in intense crunch at work. I was given a 7000-8000 frame two character (chocolate Raccoons) cinematic that was due in a week, on top of this test which I obviously wanted to kick a little ass on. I asked my boss if I could work at home to do that assignment when really my ulterior motive was to do this test during the day, cranking out the chocolate Raccoon work stuff at night.. while pounding down cokes like my life depended on it. Seeing as my work animation consisted solely of animating cartoony chocolate Raccoons, my Bungie test I submitted CLEARLY shows I wasn't used to animating realistic humans.

The test I was given was to animate a soldier walking with his gun and getting shot and dying. I think that's all it was.

Here's my first attempt..How about those legs??? It's like a goddamn Fleischer cartoon!

I remember thinking "Well, I guess this ok." I was also high on cola at the time. I thought that by adding in another guy and having the character jump into the scene and sneak around would be more than they asked and they would be all impressed and shit. Well....as was Bungie's practise then, you were asked to do revisions:

"Completing these revisions will help us gain a better understanding of how you work in a team environment and with constructive critisism. We really appreciate the you taking the time to complete the revisions.

Critique:

We feel the character is too quick on the intial jump/drop from the ledge
We feel the character does not show enough force/weight when landing from the jump/drop from the ledge.
The walk remains a little skewed and awkward. Can you use reference from movies like Black Hawk down for the walk while aiming? The timing of the walk seems a little too cartoony and very loose in the leg motion. Dragging the toes is something marines just don't do, and the toes drag and feel floppy in this animation. Think of him walking caustiously but intently. Precise and deliberate.
On the contrary to "stiffening" up the walk itself, you can afford to loosen up the aiming of the gun a little bit. Again, reference from a movie like Black Hawk Down or other SWAT team reference video may be of help.
Having the another character come out and fire off a point blank shot was very fun and refreshing to see an original approach in the animation test. We really liked that added touch. However, we feel the death fall needs some more resolve. Perhaps more secondary motion and complete recovery on the action. Bring him to rest after he dies.
Thanks again for taking the time to complete these revisions. We really do appreciate your efforts and await seeing the results with great anticipation. "

So...knee deep in sleep exhaustion and 8000 frames of chocolate Raccoons, I sent this piece of shit:

What the hell? Is he wearing high heels? Did he shit his pants?

And once again, Bungie sent more revisions:

"Thanks for sending in those revisions. We had an opportunity to view your recent fixes to your animation test and to be honest, we were caught a little off guard. It is evident that you took the time to slow down the jump/fall and add some smoothness. It is also evident that you started fixing the walk to the specifications we had asked for, though the result you sent in did not fully cover what we felt needed changing. Also, the death felt like it did not change enough if at all, from the original test.

In short, can you make additional revisions to this animation? Knowing what we outlined as changes in our previous correspondence, can you complete the revisions we asked for originally? Can you fix the walk? Can you make the walk less "poppy" and off-balance? By "poppy" I mean that the animation sticks when coming in and out of keyposes/strides. Can you use "ease in and outs" better on the walk? Can you expans on the death a little bit, making him recover less quickly and less "choppy"? ..."

Whoops! I'm a shitty animator, what can I say? Frustrated and tired from a hellish schedule and chocolate Raccoons...I polished this turd:

After I sent in that shitfest, I got this email:

"Thanks once again for completing the requested revisions.

We are currently reviewing your material and will contact you again shortly.

Thanks, and have a great day."

In the end I didn't get the gig and I ended up animating chocolate Raccoons and effeminate Squirrels for 7 years. Looking back, I can CLEARLY see why. Oh well....would have been a good gig....not to mention those cake bonus checks JB received. Shut the F, you know you got some.

What I like:

The characters dying. It's symbolic of my animation talent.

What I don't like:

Chocolate Raccoons.

Conclusion:

When in doubt, blame everything on Chocolate Raccoons.

Sheridan College - 1999, by JB

Okay, for my first post here I figured I would take us all on a trip in the way-back machine to April, 1999 at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario, Canada. Nigel and I are both working like mad men on our student films, both crazed from lack of sleep and high on too many bottles of Coke. There's no way in hell I'm going to finish animating my film in time, plus this is back before Sheridan went all computer so we had to sign up for camera time and shoot the damnedthings on 16mm film...THEN we had to go to the lab and edit and sync up our audio tracks, which were also on 16mm Mag film. God, what a pain in the ass. No wonder so many people dropped out.

Anyway, I just watched this thing for literally the first time in a decade and man is it a piece of shit. I'm lucky I even got an interview out of this, let alone a job offer. I wanted to be an effects animator so bad. I mean, I should have titled this thing 'Smoke, Shadows, and Shitty Animation'. Check out the horrible writing, brutal poses, and floaty as fuck animation. Like seriously, this is really embarassing to post, so I hope you're happy. Look at when he stabs the dagger into the log - lolol SO SHITTY!!

Going Home 1999 from John B on Vimeo.

So keep an eye out for how the poses just melt between one another. Timing? What the fuck is that? By the end I didn't even give a shit about keeping them on model any more. If young me submitted this reel to old me today I would probably watch it, snort laughter to myself, then call a couple of buddies over to make fun of it for a while...then send young me a form rejection letter and call it a day.

BONUS - I've saved some rejection letters I have from 2001 from various video game studios I sent stuff to when the place Nigel and I were working closed down. He got a gig in SLC, and I managed to BS my way into a place in CA. Most of them are boring letters, but I think I have like 10 of them. I'll put them in another post.

Oh, keep an eye out in my film for some guest animation from Nigel. See when the kid steps out of the brush - yep, he did that for me one evening as a trade for some bubbles in a beaver shot he was animating (I think). Anyway, it's probably the best thing about my pile of garbage film. Also, I even got Tony Todd (yes, the Candyman, Lt. Darrow from The Rock, and the Fallen in Transformers 2) to provide his voice for the main character in my film...and this is what I made. Jesus Christ. Tony (or TTT as we called him, because that's the way he signed all his letters and emails) is still the coolest guy in the world for helping me, some no-name kid in Canada, out with his film and one day I'll get to thank him in person. I don't even think getting Optimus Prime and Megatron would have been cooler.

What Went Right - LOL
What Went Wrong - Watch the thing.

MORE BONUS - I found an FX reel I made in 3rd year animation to show around. The color scene that you can barely make out what's happening in is all hand painted cels with a watercolor background. It's a bunker firing machine guns towards the camera, then a rocket blowing them up. Yep, you guessed it - it sucks too!

FX Reel 1999 from John B on Vimeo.

Enjoy, fuckers.

JB

DEMO REEL DECONSTRUCTION: "The Horse"

Let the bitchfest begin...

Sound clip: None.

What I like:

I should do a section called "What my Mom likes" cause she's the only fan of this one. I like my flipbook planning test, which I followed maybe way too close. I was fascinated with Jason Ryan's approach of the whole Flipbook planning thing and I used it for three pieces on my reel. It worked on one, helped out a bit on the other and on this one, it ended up being better than the final. Here's the flipbook test:

This piece was filled with so many friggin' problems it was insane. I also chose this one to do LAST, when I was obviously beyond burnt out. Horses are INFINITELY hard to animate. They're also harder to animate if you have a shit rig. They're also harder to animate if the guy who made the rig doesn't understand basic horse anatomy. So I bought this "Realistic horse" model, as it was labelled for WAY too much $$$ off of Turbosquid. Why? because it was rigged and ready to go. Or so I thought. I bought the rig because I didn't want to start a horse rig from the ground up and I wanted to finish the reel asap. When I got it downloaded I played around with it, it seemed ok. Then I put it away and worked on other pieces. Came back to it and noticed that the most important action this horse needed to do, something a horse does all the goddamn time, was IMPOSSIBLE.

See my problem? yeah I was freaking out. I dug online and found the guy, he was in Europe somewhere and sent him an email, seeing as he labelled it as a "realistic horse rig" and I paid MONEY for this piece of shit, I'm entitled to getting what I PAID for. He responded told me he would get back to me and "see what he can do..." Well a year or so has gone by...nothing. So I had some rigger experts look at it and they even tried to fix it without re-riggin it. No dice. Not only would it have to be remodelled and the head rescaled, the neck rig placement was NOT where it should have been. Also there was a saddle rig and reins rig on there as well to consider. Major pain in the ass. So I re-rigged it with the Setup machine. That was a bloody nightmare. I spent weeks Remodelling AND rerigging AND reweighting the sunnuvabitch. It was a pain trying to make the legs work the right way, seeing as the set up machine doesn't do four legged animals very well(shoulder/scapula guys? COME ON). I busted my ass trying to make it work and eventually I got something that wasn't totally shitty. Then I key framed the thing, sorting out all kinds of friggin issues. Keying two characters that interact and one has so many bones to worry about=>major headache. Took forever. So bottomline, what I like about this is.....I got the stupid thing DONE.

...Oh and the head shake, cause that's what my Mom's horses would do. In fact, this is based off EXACTLY what they do in this situation. Sons of bitches!

What I don't like:

Besides, EVERYTHING?

I've been told before that my animation is very..."Stop-motiony". I think this is the best example of that. Obviously, it feels clunky. It is. It's also a friggin' hard piece, lets see you do it! also it drags near the end, a lot more than I planned. Shoulda had the guy drag the chair so it was closer when he fell or just cut the whole piece earlier, like after he slaps him. The slap on the ass is slow and almost effeminate.

Probably could have spent more time on the tail and ears. As a lot of a horse's attitudes are told through both. The spaz out after the slap could have been better but I was DYING to get that thing off the screen so bad, it was a bitch to animate. A BITCH.

The lighting sucks. That's for sure.

I could retime this piece and fix a few things but who the hell cares. Not too long after this was finished there was a free horse rig thrown up on High end 3d that was WAY better than the rig and model I had, but once again, it's head couldn't reach the ground. Does nobody LOOK at what they are modelling/rigging anymore?

When my reel was shown to a guy from Bluesky through a buddy of mine, the Bluesky guy said bluntly "cut the last two pieces they're crap" or something to that effect. While I couldn't agree more....those two pieces amounted to more half a YEAR of my life. That's heart breaking. I was depressed for months. But big whoop, move onto the next thing. Animation is a bitch. Maybe next time I do a horse it won't suck as bad as this.

Conclusion:

Hell on earth. Shoulda put the flipbook test on the reel.

Here's some of the ten trillion thumbnails I did for this.

DEMO REEL DECONSTRUCTION: "The Tune"

Deleted piece created for Demo Reel from Clutch Falco on Vimeo.

Here is a piece I cut from my reel, even before I finished the thing. It's just terrible.

Soundclip:

I was looking for the premiere of one of my favorite bands new songs on this swedish online radio station but I didn't know exactly what time during the radio show it came on. So I ended up recording a huge 4 hour wav file and digging through it. While editing it down to where the song was, I noticed big sound drops in the radio show, like when the DJ comes on and talks, I stopped editing and found this bizarre interview with the band Tokyo Dragons. Obviously the band was very drunk and or high and had no idea what the hell they were talking about. I took three 15-37 sec clips from the interview and planned on animating them all. There was so many gems in the clips, kinda like Creature Comforts where it's real dialogue from people, not actors so it was too juicy not to use. Well, I started with the smallest clip when I started on my demo reel and ultimately scrapped it in favor of this clip. In the end I couldn't animate either well enough. Oh well. Lessons learned.

What went right:

Well... nothing.

But I did go out an buy a barstool from Walmart or Target, go home, drink beers and shoot my reference, promply returning the chair the next day. I guess that's dedication. I like the stumble, that's about it. Everything else is shit.

What went wrong:

Well...where to start.

When I animated this around the end of July and August of 2007, I was obvious distracted with something else, so my heart wasn't in this one. I attempted to get drunk on beer to shoot reference but since it was Utah beer, it was just taking too long to get drunk enough. But as you can see from the first part when he crosses his leg and stumbles, that was me in my reference, so I guess I was a bit tipsy. I tried reference Keith Richards and attempted to get a similar flare of body movement but I ultimately failed BIG TIME. I had plans to animate the other guy on the couch a bit, but I gave up.

Personally I think the beginning drink and headshake looks tagged on because..it was. I didn't figure out a strong way to start this so I straight aheaded what's at the beginning and it looks like it too.

I also think the momentum of drunkness and interesting Keith Richards type drunkness I tried to get, DIES right after "Rock bands kinda..y'know....lost". If you watch that closely you can see that the body stiffens up and it looses the drunkeness. I didn't do a good job referencing for this so I ran out of ideas, but since I was on a do or die schedule on the reel, I just dove in without proper research or planning. This is the best example of screwing it up for the reel I can think of. Besides the horse animation on my reel, but the bitchfest for that is coming in a few posts. 28 seconds was long for a one person clip, with no camera changes. There is some okay stuff in here I think, but only very minor things.

Conclusion:

If your heart's not in it, scrap it. Also, distractions with breasts are bad for you.

Bonus:

For the hell of it, here's the clip I tried before using the other interview clip, that I ultimately scrapped during the blocking phase. At one point he was gunna hand over the record to the other guy on the couch who's strumming his guitar. My intention was to animate these like the druken interviews with glam rock bands I saw on Much Music growing up. In this clip he's talking about how awesome the album cover is. And yeah, I just used a placeholder texture for the record cover, so don't read much into it.

October Clip "Women"

Well whoopdeefrickindoo. Here goes nada.

This is a first in a series of SHORT clips I'm gunna do once a month or so to keep the blood flowing to the part of my brain that I use to animate. I'll let you know when it gets there. Buhdumppish!!

Soundclip:

Bruce Campbell from his audiobook "How To Make Love The Bruce Campbell Way"

What I like:

Uh...I got it done in a month, during a buncha lunches. I don't know how many hours. If I did maybe people would go from thinking "Pfft...the clip isn't much to write home about..." to maybe "What's that? You did it in 4 hours? Wow....not bad.....I guess." But whatev. It's done. NEXT.

What I don't like:

Well the speaking on the sound clip is REEALLY fast so the lipsync is pretty wild. Probably could have been better. Coulda put some effort into the set, like the couch cushion coulda had a lattice on it so it responded to his movement. The point during "from a hole in the ground.." has been...uh..pointed out as being distracting by a few peeps. But what the hell, it was in my video reference I shot so I figured why not. Besides a straight point might have been even more weaksauce and I HATE pointing in animation. It usually feels forced, canned or over the top. In this case, I guess you could say that's the point of the....point gesture...to draw your eye to what he's talking about. But really, this is just a short dumb clip going nowhere. NEXT.

Here's the original ending I had. I felt the end pose felt like I was doing a loop whenever I would playblast so I shot some ref and tried something different. Here's how it was before:

Here's some thumbnails I did from my vid ref. I don't have a scanner at the moment so digital camera will have to do. I hate drawing thumbnails. I always get impatient doing them. I usually draw stick figures so my blood pressure isn't too high. I cut out the motion thumbnailed for the "ass" part, a sorta slight tumble with the arms. Just too much for this short of a clip. Keep it simple shithead!

Conclusion:

NEXT.

More to come..