New Class, New Rigs, New Syllabus?

Class 2 begins tomorrow for me. Midnight class with mentor Kevin Andrus. Kevin is a Dreamworks animator who has worked on How to Train Your Dragon (I really enjoyed this movie!) and is currently working on How to Train Your Dragon 2! I spent a lot of time looking through the available mentors and chose Kevin based on the critiques he gave other students. He seemed to really have an interest in their work and he gave very thorough critiques. I received my 'welcome to Class 2' email from Kevin and I am confident that I made the right choice. I'm really looking forward to getting into it! Our syllabus has been available for about a week now. I checked it out and was preparing for my new assignments. We were to start out with Ballie (the ball with legs) again and do some more advanced motions. Continuing in the thread of building on the previous assignment, really driving these fundamentals home. For the past few months AM has been advertising their new TRIBE set of rigs that would be coming out in Spring of '13. Well they released them yesterday and I was surprised to find that I had access to them (they limit your access based on your class and what you need to use/don't need to use). I downloaded them all and messed around. They are a ton of fun, but very overwhelming...going from Ballie's 3 controls to 20+! I figured they were just giving them all to us because they hyped them so much, but I wouldn't be using them until class 3 or 4. 

 

Today I find a new syllabus has been released. No more ballie. He's out the door. I start right out of the gate using Stella (the female rig), then progress to Sloan (the DOG rig!) and then to Stan (the giant guy!). I am a little shaken/overwhelmed at the idea of moving from Ballie to a full bodied rig, in what seems like a very short time. I think it's akin to the feeling I had when dad took my training wheels off of my bike. AM has been smart and thoughtful to this point, and I am incredibly happy with my progress to date, so I have to believe there is strong logic behind dropping ballie from class 2 and inserting the TRIBE characters. All of the assignments (save the last one) deal with different walk cycles. I have 12 weeks of walk cycles to look forward to! I am anxious and interested to see how all of this plays out, and excited to become a stronger animator.