Stupid Gearheads is fianlly done!!! (Current Demo Reel)

Well after many months of hard work my Short film "Stupid Gearheads" is finally finsihed. you can view it in the video of my current demo reel below. Special thanks to Greg Whittaker, Cal Brunker, Keith Sintay, Kevin Koch; my good friend Josh Gridley and all of the staff and students of Animation Mentor and last but not least the Turbosquid.com community For all of there help in making this film what it is today.
Employers can Download my resume here:
sewell_resume_fax.doc

Stupid Gearheads

Well, after 11 weeks of pre-production and another 11 weeks of production, I present to you my nearly completed short film "Stupid Gearheads". I am going to take another week or so to really finish the short off, but for now here it is in it's nearly completed form. "Stupid Gearheads" is property of Paul Sewell. No unauthorized use permitted.



Story and all animation herein created by Paul Sewell (email: psewell@sewell-animations.com)
Character designs and rigs courtesy of www.animationmentor.com
Vehicles, props and backgrounds courtesy of the www.turbosquid.com community.

Special thanks to www.animationmentor.com, the community at www.turbosquid.com, Greg Whittaker, Cal Brunker, Josh Gridley and all of the great classmates at www.animationmentor.com

Long overdue update

Okay, so I'm not exactly the most dedicated blogger. But hey, better late then never. Anyway, I finished my first dialog shot at AM a few weeks ago and have started on my 2 character dialog shot. Anyway, I won't ramble on. Here they are.

Here's the 2 character shot just barely coming out of the blocking phase. Still lot's to do here but I think the core is all there. The shot is still in linear so the spacing is even. I'll move to spline next week.


Here is what I had originally but my mentor wanted me to simplify the first shot. I still like it but I can see why my mentor wanted the changes too I suppose. Anyway, for those of you with my email, let me know what you think.



And Here is the final single character shot I finished a couple weeks ago.

class 3 week 6 It's Bishop Time Baby!!!

HaHA!!! Yeah!!! Finally we get to start working on lip syncs with a full character (Bishop) here at AM. We will finish the pantomime and eye movements this quarter then next quarter we finish the lip sync and facial expressions. I can't wait to get started on this one! I have been tirelessly wading through hours and hours of movie dialog trying to find a really unique piece to do my lip sync to. There are two that I really, really want to do but they are too long for the frame limit in this assignment, so hopefully I will be able to do one of them next quarter. I'm already planning those out in my head and I haven't even started the first one yet. Anyway, you may be wondering what the dialog is for my shot. Well, you'll just have to wait and see ;) Hey gotta get that traffic to this blog somehow.

class 3 week 5 Fianlly done

Whew, Finally done! This one sure had it's fair share of headaches but I managed to not kill myself and worked through them. Anyhoo, not a lot to say this week so here it is in all of it's.....erm.....glory...?... ;)

Special thanks to Cesar Tafoya and everyone else that gave some much needed feedback last week.

class 3 week 4

Oh man, what a week. Work has been killin me, and along with all the work I have to put into my animation I think I'm about to go over the edge.

Still have not brought everything out of linear mode yet, working on my arcs before I worry to much about spacing.

I am working on some moving holds in the part where Stewie is looking around before jumping over the couch; but right now its just static holds. This has proved to be a difficult area for me because the moving holds look contrived. Not sure that I am really thrilled with the timing there either.

I am also having issues with the flip over the couch because the knees and elbows are flipping all over the place so I may end up doing that frame by frame. I'm to tired to figure it out in the graph editor right now. other then that most of my work this week has been in the first half of the animation. Looking forward to hearing what you have to say so on those areas so I can get moving on the rest this week.

I wish this was a little further along (still have done a lot) but I was struggling for hours with a broken rig after a particularly rough day at work and I just don't have it in me to do anymore tonight. I finally remembered that I had heard that you can transfer animations to a fresh rig, so after learning how to do that I transfered my animation but it was not a perfect transfer even though I am positive that I did it exactly right. I ended up having to tweak a lot of poses again. So I figure, get some sleep and hit it hard first thing Monday.

Anyway, all is not a loss. I changed up the middle a lot and got things reading much better there. I also added some better anticipation to the initial shocked reaction at the beginning. I have also added some more breakdowns throughout the animation so transitioning into my first polish pass next week shouldn't be a problem.