I gotta say, I'm a little nervous with this whole Maya program thing; last semester in 3D Rendering with Maya I, I got a C on my final (pictured here at the bottom). With this semester taking 3D Rendering II and 3D Animation I, I gotta stay on my toes.

While, for some reason, rendering character heads and bodies in Rendering II seems easier to me than rendering a room, I'm mainly focused on the Animation projects. The Professor today reviewed previous classmate's projects that parallel with what we're about to work on...they all have the same pattern;

-Blank, spacious, desolate backgrounds with minimal details
-(X) bullied by (Y) which is then attacked by (Z) usually in an act of defending (X).
-Soulless, emotionless stares from all characters involved.

To recover from my C in Maya last semester, I intend to kick-ass and count teeth to compensate in both Animation and Maya II. I can start doing this by standing out with a class project that'll take the audience off guard, and make them laugh...switch it up by taking away something that they're used to and offering them something new.

To boot, yesterday was incredibly unproductive for me. Not only did I neglect to work on the Lady Noir flash, but I got homework due for Digital Imaging I tomorrow morning as well as History of Animation homework Wednesday evening. Shit, I still haven't even done the four concept sketches for Maya II yet, but I'm confident I can knock out all of these homework assignments later today.

Not to mention I get chills thinking of how much work still needs to be done on Lady Noir and how much time I have left to do it. I feel like I'm going to get so swamped with school assignments in the near future, I won't have time for collab deadlines for a while. I gotta just balance my time with early semester homework and Lady Noir's animation...at least I'm partaking in RedHarvest's collab in the beginning of the semester while it's still only building up momentum in the homework department.

Deadline's on the 7th of Feb. Gotta get it done. Getcha Pull. Film at Eleven....Do me.

-G-

EDIT: I've decided not to push for completing my Lady Noir short for the deadline on February 7th. Here's why.
-Homework takes priority over any flash animation. It stops becoming a matter of mismatched time-management when there's little to no time left to manage. By cutting deadlines off completely, I've made life much simpler.
-My progress working on it was going so slow, even with the great optimism, I'm certain I would've missed the deadline anyway.
-Most shorts are going to be around a minute long if that. I clocked in the estimated time of my short to be 3:00+. By bowing out, I'm essentially saving them from a bulky file-size.
-I was becoming stressed from working on that thing...I really picked a bad time to try and challenge my own skills when I'm challenging my own academics at the same time. I was burning the candle on both ends, and looking at the days tack away while I barely got any work done only depressed me and stressed me out further. Without a deadline to worry about, I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders.
-I will eventually finish my short in my own free time. When I'm allowed to take my time on it, it'll be epic; There's no point in rushing something that has the potential to be greater; I learned that after working on Zone of the Awesome.