During the summer I up for a class at the Animation Collaborative over in Emeryville. I’ve been eyeing these workshops for years and I decided to try one of the slightly shorter and slightly cheaper summer sessions to get my feet wet. Animating for 8 hours a day is obviously not enough. I took the Advanced Animation Critque workshop with Victor Navone, a longtime Pixar animator, and a really great teacher. The course was 8 weeks long and I worked on three shots for it. Here they are!

Animation Collaborative – Summer 2015 from Janel Drewis on Vimeo.

Shot 1 was a head turn assignment. I saw a guy falling asleep on the bus and decided to mash the two into one assignment (he turns his head a little at the end, okay?)

Shot 2 was a gear change assignment, going from one emotion to another. I decided to do a baseball pitcher seeing his pitch turn into a homerun. Something about the way pressure pitchers put themselves under and the disappointment they feel towards themselves in these kinds of moments made me want to animate it.

Shot 3 was a piece of dialogue from Mad Men that I liked and put into a restaurant setting. It’s the first piece of two person dialogue I’ve ever done and I’m not incredibly happy with the end result but I learn a lot and am really happy with myself for just finishing it.

I learned so much from Victor and the other students during the class. Since I never finished Animation Mentor’s program, I never really got to dive into acting training, and this class was just the kick in the butt I needed to get back into that stuff! Hope you like it. Keep an eye out for more work soon.