Dove eating bread

While I was waiting for the bus to go to work today, I had the chance to watch a dove eate some huge bread that some person apparently didn't like anymore. The dove seemed pretty excited about it being the only dove there. Sharing gives you friends, but not sharing gives you more bread. What a conflict. Anyway... I tried to observe the movements: It hardly lifted the feed of the ground and each step might just have been 3 or 4 frames. Nice swaying motion with the whole body and a pulsating squash and stretch of the neck when swallowing the bread.
I need to lear modelling, texturing and rigging so that I can try to animate birds, too.
God made cool creatures.

Dream Job: Veggietales

Hmm, mostly all AM students seems to want to work at Pixar. I guess I wouldn't mind that but I'd rather work for Big Idea, the makers of the funny christian series "Veggietales". That show got me hooked onto animation. They don't have arms but lots of heart.

If you buy 500 diapers you'll get a free baby. They even deliver it in the original box. Cool collector's item. 

First Q&A in second Class

This morning at 6:30 am German time we had our first meeting in the second class at AM. (I am tempted to call it "2nd semester" but you can only speak of a semester if you have two of those a year, with three it's "trimester" and with four ... "quadromester"?)
We have new and fewer classmates which is good cause everybody gets more attention. But also there might be some weird moments when nobody asks a question.
Also we have a new Mentor, David Smith. He told us a bit about his animation chareer. He had been working for several studios since 1997 and now works for Pixar on Cars. He said they really value animators there whichis not the case in all the studios he had worked at.
We students got to introduce ourselves and it was really neat seeing some new faces. There were some webcam issues though. Hopefully those will get solved for the next Q&A.

Tonight I want to start with my first assignment for the 2nd class, a blocked character walk that shows overlapping and shape reversal. I tried several walks yesterday but my wife said they all look boring. So, I might try a T-Rex walk similar to the one Jim Carrey does in the movie "... series of unfortunate events".