Reel Spring 2006

Final Reel for Anim. Mechanics Class
contributions: story, animation, lighting
completion date: May 2006
running time: 28 sec
movie size: 1.65 mb

This is the final reel of my Animation Mechanics Class of spring semester at AAU, all the clips were assignments form this class.

It was my first semester, and also the first fundamental animation class, I thought we might start from a boucing ball and learn the principles, but we didn't... The 1st animation assignment was "Fishing ", then the "Walkcycle", "Wu-Shu"-find a clip that people do loop kick or flips and animate it out in maya, and the last one is "Lip-sync". When the lip-sync assignment were announced, there's only 2 weeks left... that was really a nightmare to finish it and edit the reel before the last class.

The sound clip for lip-sync was from the movie called "Animal House". And the music was an opening of another great movie ""Office Space", I saw it been used for animation reels many times that has almost become a cliche, but it's really in the right mood and totally matches the tempo, so I use it for a demo reel, again.

What I thought about the scene at first was: one insane commander, or maybe sort of old man who can't forget the past like World War II, is making a speech to the soldiers intensely. But later I found there's a similar work at The 10 Sec Club on that month, so I tried to think another idea. I wished to make it funny, and the funniest element of this clip would be the person who's talking is insane, then the characteristic and the reaction of the person he's talking to must be a contrast, so what situation would make people strogly think the talking one's crazy and the scene is interesting?

Then here comes the current version - a crazy cab driver and an innocent,scared passenger who's life is under a threaten :D