Heya folks!
Sorry for the lack of updates lately! We’re in the final few weeks of finishing up animation on Megamind, and I’m a bit busy at the moment. 
I’ll get back on track with updates and stuff after we wrap! Woo!
Plastic Animation Paper – PAP:Pro 4.0 for free.
Woah! plastic animation paper for free!
sweeeeeeeeeeet!
Comic Con Panel – Megamind with Will Ferrell.
There was a megamind panel at comicon this morning at 10, and the buzz is coming back that it was a lot of fun! They showed 5 minutes of the movie, which has shots from all through the film.. Everything should be on Yahoo movies tomorrow, so hopefully people will watch and enjoy!
You know I love Animation Mentor. Not only is it one of the best places to learn character animation in the world, but the founders and the staff are such awesome human beings that they infuse the entire Animation Mentor experience with pure, unfiltered, pure awesome. Seriously.. you just mention “Animation Mentor” to someone and immediately you’re surrounded with hugs, and smiles, and great stories.
I spoke with the friggin amazing Bobby Beck, and am now able to offer a discount on the Animator Friendly Rigging products to all Animation Mentor students and alumni!
Bobby will be distributing the information to students and alum on how to get the discounts!
Enjoy!
I’m super jazzed about what the awesome people at Rigging Dojo are doing to help people interested in character rigging learn more about the craft. They’re all fantastic teachers, excellent riggers, and just darn-right awesome human beings. I’m really excited to be able to offer a 10% discount on the Animator Friendly Rigging DVD series for rigging dojo students!
If you’re a student there, please contact brad, josh, or chad to find out how to get your discount!
Woot!
I’ve stuck pretty rigidly to my GTD plan these past two weeks and I can really feel a difference in my stress level and my ability to feel like I’m on top of everything on my plate.
I’ve modified my toodledo system a tiny bit. Previously I mentioned that I had 4 folders set up in toodledo:
This worked for a little while, but I soon found that my Projects folder was getting a bit overrun, so I decided to change Projects to Areas of Focus. This lets me separate the areas where I don’t have any overlap to allow me to focus better.
My folder structure now looks like:
As you can see I also added a Calendar folder. This is where I’m keeping things like birthdays and other events that I want to find quickly and easily.
What’s really been helping me keep on track however is being SUPER diligent about not letting my email inbox balloon out of control. My goal is to get it to zero every night, but that’s not always possible to do before heading home to be with the family.
That means I also don’t skim through and start reading my work emails until I get into work in the morning (or sit down at the computer at night) and have time to process everything.
I absolute refuse to let an email sit in my inbox read. If it’s sitting there, and I’ve read it, I force myself to make a decision on it. Is it a task? Is it an action? Do I need to read it later and figure out what I’m going to do with it? Even if that last option is the one I need to do, I make it a project, drag it to my Active folder in outlook, and then make a task in toodledo to read the email and process it.
This works for my physical inbox as well. I spent a good 4 hours on Saturday going through my entire office and cleaning up all my old files, todo notes, etc. I got everything current, emptied my inbox, and made sure to have a good clean space that’s enjoyable to sit in.
It’s amazing how just having a clean area and a clean inbox can allow you to focus 100% on a task at hand and really plow through it.
I think I’m totally hooked!
Now.. I still wish I had a cleaner UI for toodledo.. it’s okay, but check this out.. has anyone used smartytask?
Smartytask for GTD (Smartytask.com) from Smarty Task on Vimeo.
It looks super slick.. I’d love to give it a try, but 100 bucks a year is a little steep.
One of the things that I’ve always said is that the techniques I discuss in Animator Friendly Rigging can be used in almost any package. The main idea is that even though the tutorials come with all sorts of mel scripts and files and explicit instructions for Maya, what people should take away are the concepts and theories behind the results.
Why should we rig the way we do?
What are we looking for?
What would help the animator the most?
etc.
That’s why I was totally jazzed to see this post on Vimeo:
AFR Rivalry! from MTracer on Vimeo.
It’s someone doing some of the same animator friendly rigging techniques I talk about in the material, but doing it in Blender!
That’s great! I love seeing stuff like this!
I’m such a dork.
This past week I’ve been doing my darndest to try and maintain a zero-sized inbox, both at home and at work. This is an incredibly daunting task. As work I receive a TON of email every day. And by a ton, I mean a metric buttload of email.
One quick example.. on wednesday at 4pm I had my inbox down to 0. That’s right, not a single email in my inbox. Not one. Zero. Kaput. Nada. Bupkis. I went off to walkies for one hour and when I returned I had over 150 messages in my email inbox.
Yeah. One hour. 150 messages. Expand that over an entire day, and you can see that my email inbox is constantly pinging me. Expand that to a week.. imagine how much information is coming at me that might require some sort of action from me. Yep, a bunch.
So this week I thought.. you know what? I’m going to see if I can practice Inbox Zero, and I’m going to use toodledo to do it.
What is inbox zero you ask?
Only the coolest thing ever.
Yeah, that’s right.. cooler than than anything ever. That’s right. I said it.
Oh, you want me to elaborate? It’s simply a way of maintaing your sanity with the amount of email coming at you. The main idea is to process your email out of your inbox into a trusted system so you’re only taking in this input ONCE.
How many of you have an email sitting in your inbox that you’ve read once before? What about twice? What about knowing that there might be an email in your inbox that you might have read that might have something important in it maybe?
That’s sooooo stressful!
So here’s what I do.. I basically follow david allen’s GTD stuff with some Merlin Mann’s inbox zero stuff, and process it into my toodledo system.
First, I set up toodledo so I had a few folders:
Next, I went to my toodledo settings and told it to put any new tasks directly into 1. Inbox.
Then I went to the tools and services area and configred my email so that I could email directly into my inbox.
Now that toodledo was set up, I went to my email program and created a few folders in there
Finally, I went to my work email and started processing my email. For every single piece of email I followed a flowchart similar to this one where I asked myself:
If an email made it through each of these things and was still around, it most likely was a project of some kind. I would then tag or assign a category to the email, drag it to the My Projects folder, and then forward the email to toodledo with a subject that defined the outcome of the project.
For example, if I got an email that said “My AFR download isn’t working”, I would forward that to toodledo with a subject that said “Fix this person’s AFR download”. If I knew what the absolute next action was that I needed to do I would add that to the notes. If I didn’t, then I knew I would think about this later and just sent it to toodledo anyway.
Then, I would continue on to the next email and the next and the next until my entire inbox was ZERO.
Then I hopped over to gmail and did the same thing.
The nice thing about this is that I found that I could head to My Projects in my email and list by tag or by category and get a good sense of all my projects that I’m currently working on. I could also head to Others Projects and see where they’re at on things. It is a really great way of seeing quickly where everything is at.
The most important thing about this is that I’m now NEVER going into my email unless I give myself time to process what’s in there. Even if I don’t have time to do those 2 minute tasks, I will simply forward those to my toodledo account knowing that I’ll get to them. This allows me to get my email down to zero and maintain it being zero. If I see that i have 30 messages sitting in there, in the past I would start cherry-picking things to read and not read, and I’d end up leaving stuff sitting there forever. Now I have the strength to say “nope, no time to process.. I’m not going to even look.”
Talk about a stress relief!
In my next post, I’ll talk about how I dealt with processing all my items that are now sitting in my Inbox at toodledo.
A couple of years ago I posted this walkcycle workflow demo on YouTube.. it shows me using the AFR rig to do a walk.
Thought it might be interesting to put it up again in case people haven’t seen it before.
I’ve now added the Animator Friendly Rigging – Part 4 page to the website, complete with example pdf files and links to the example youtube movies.
Here’s an example of the movie for part 4a:
Now that all of the parts are up and available for purchase either independently, or as a bundle, I’m continuing to try and make as much information available on this site as possible. Over the next few weeks I’ll be filling out the FAQ, updating the main AFR page, and hopefully updating scripts and such as they become available.
Thanks again to everyone for purchasing the material, I love that it’s getting out there!
cheers!
-jason
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