 Welcome back, if you are a repeat viewer, if not, hello. So, let's get right into FNA Friday, and today I'm gonna talk about goals. The title of this is, this should be your goal. Now you're wondering what this is. Basically, I wanna talk about when you start a shot, what should be your mindset, what should be your goal when you attack a shot. Meaning that let's say you get a bouncing ball. So you're in a class structure assignment type of environment, you get a bouncing ball, and the teacher says, do a bouncing ball, medium weight, bouncing from left to right. If you're hearing this and what you're gonna deliver is a regular bouncing ball, doing exactly that, that's totally fine and valid, you did the assignment and that's okay. But I encourage you to go beyond, go further, push yourself, try something you haven't done before, and that way you will potentially fail, not fail the class, but you will fail and get feedback and try again and grow and learn because you tried something new. If you're just staying within the safe box, the safe environment, it's just not gonna be as rewarding and you're not gonna grow as much as an artist. I think I could be totally wrong, but that is my approach. So as an example, I'm gonna show you what I show my students at the academy. And it's gonna be a grading scale from F to A. Now this does not apply for instance, animation mentor or any other school you might go, or you might do something at home and you don't have any grades. Hopefully it can be a visual guide of what you should be looking out for and a starting point for the shots that you wanna do. So let's get right into it. These are the examples. I'm gonna start off with an F. F for fail. So the examples that you're gonna see here from an F to an A are shots that I animated. So it's not work from another student that I'm taking here to make fun of or anything. That's just an example of shots that I saw and hopefully that serve as a guide of what not to do and then with future examples of what to do. So let's start with this one. This is an F. This is supposed to be a bouncing ball. And let's go into this mode. I would not present any grid or any nerves controllers. Keep it all clean and for a bouncing ball that should be bouncing left or right like this. This doesn't quite make sense. So if it's presented like this in a not so clean fashion and the ball is not really bouncing as we would expect a regular bouncing ball to behave, that will be an F. Now let's get to a D. A D is this. It gets kind of better. So we still have the grid, we still have the controllers but the lines are there, the curves are there. It's kind of looking like a bouncing ball but it's still not great. It still has a lot of problems and this wouldn't be a passing grade. This is a C. That's not too bad. I mean, it's gray on gray but it has the arcs, it has the bounces. It's kind of okay. This is your standard bouncing ball, I would say. A little bit of settle there at the end. So it's just enough. So if you go to school and your teacher says, let's do a bouncing ball, this is your first assignment and you're doing this, that's totally okay. You did it right, the principles are there. You're not gonna fail the class hopefully and that's not too bad. Let's look at a B. You have balls of different sizes, right? Different weight, it's kind of an obstacle course, different behavior. There's other stuff happening in the shot and a surprise introducing another type of ball and weight. So it's just going a bit beyond the standard C grade approach or average default bouncing ball. Now you might be wondering, what is an A? So I'm gonna show you an example that I animated but I would not expect anybody to do this in their first week at a school. When someone says, do a bouncing ball and you're gonna do this, that'd be ridiculous. But let's take a look at it. So I'm obviously exaggerating but this is technically a bouncing ball assignment. Yes, I'm cheating with a ball with legs but other than that, it's a bouncing ball. I'm just taking it a little bit further with some camera animation. These are all the same bouncing balls. It's copy pasted. There's just a bit more to it. I'm exaggerating, it's not a bit. This is way too exaggerated. But you're taking the idea of a bouncing ball and you're running with this. You're going above and beyond. You're looking at, this is the main structure of the assignment, it's a bouncing ball. What could I do with this idea and go further? That's always kind of funky. I gotta fix that shot. There's something at the way at the end. It kind of stops so quickly. But that is it, bam, it comes in. So obviously, like I said, this is not something that you would expect from someone starting off. But what I'm trying to say is that your mindset should be, okay, this is the assignment. This is the list of things I need to do. Am I going to do just what's ask of me? Or am I going to go above and beyond and push it and push myself? Because if you just do your default work, you can learn, but you're not gonna learn, at least I think, enough. If you push yourself and you just go a bit further and try something that you haven't done before, you might not get the best grade because you might fail at it. It doesn't mean you have to fail the class, but you're gonna just push yourself enough. Run into problems, but because of that, you're gonna learn something new. People will explain it to you how to make it better. You'll have your classmates that will help you. Hopefully your teacher will help you. That should be your goal to attack a shot in a way where you just do more. And not just for the sake of doing more and just throwing all kinds of stuff in there, but you wanna approach it with, how can I push my boundaries and what can I do that I haven't done before that will help me grow? And besides being ridiculous, this example that I'm showing you, one thing that I like, if you go back here and look at this, always like this thing is that there's the parents jumping this way, protecting kids as the other ones are fleeing, stuff like that. I like to put stuff like that in my shots, but you know, that's just me. There are other examples that I like to show to my students in terms of taking an assignment and going beyond. This doesn't look like an exercise, but it looks more like a shot. One of them would be this one by Stefan. He was one of my students for a short period of time, but it was very clear how good he was. And this is gonna be a post I'll be doing later on going into the specifics of why I like the shot and why there are so many elements that I think are very successful. And then there's the shot by Julian. He was also a student of mine. I'm not saying this because, you know, they're so good because they're my students, but I was fortunate enough to see them work. And sometimes you just get to see someone's work and you know right away that that person, it's not a question of if they're going to get hired, it's more when. There's just something that they're doing and they're approaching how they do the shots and the idea, the shot creation, the creativity. They're just going above and beyond. It's just very interesting to watch. And this is one of them. So again, I will do this in a future post going into detail why I like this, but just one of those things where as a whole, it's just so good. And of course, I love stuff like this, little detail of the handle, closing, that stuff like that. I love this. Another example would be Lucas the spider by Joshua Slides. He took my workshop way back when I did the workshop in the city. From the get-go, I saw his work and to me it was what am I going to teach you? You already know so much. And I basically gave him some polished notes and just, you know, like we had some different ideas in terms of acting choices, which are very subjective, but it was very clear that he was very, very talented. And I'm not saying that if you don't do any of this, if you're just going by the numbers that you won't make it, that's not what I'm trying to say, but I hope that you like animation enough that you love it, that you're going to go above and beyond because that's something that you want to do. If you feel like it's a chore, I just gotta go through those stupid assignments and I don't really know, I don't know if I want to do this, then my feeling is in what's the point because it is a lot of hard work. You're going to put in a lot of hours as a student and once you are at a company, it's not going to get better in terms of hours. You're not going to work less. So to me, you need to have a love for it so that you can take that passion and apply this in a way where you just go, like I said, above and beyond. I'm repeating myself, but that's kind of the thing. So your goal should be what can I do to push myself as much as I can so I can learn as much as I can and grow. But again, this is very subjective. You might completely disagree and that's totally fine and you might have your own approach that's totally fine too. I'm speaking from my own experiences. When I started at the Academy way back and I did my personal assignments at my homework, there are just certain elements that I wanted to put in because I had fun with it and I wanted to push myself and learn and do more. I'm going to show you just quickly little bits and pieces of assignments that I did when I was a student. And even though they're not great and some of them are questionable in terms of content, I can still show you those elements that I enjoy doing. So if you take this one, I just like doing the animation with the pedals, the pedals bending here on this ball. You got the snot moving here. There's just a lot of detail work that I enjoyed putting in. But again, it doesn't have to be something that you need to do. If you look at this one, it's a ridiculous assignment. It was a get out of the chair assignment, but after 40 seconds, the character is still not out of the chair. Well, there's just a lot of elements that I enjoy putting in like stuff like this where there's drag overlap in the previous class. How can I put that into the assignment? And so on and so on. It's still not the assignment. It's only now the assignments, but I just love doing stuff like this. And this goes to assignments that I did outside of class. Again, this is all super weird. But if you watch this in full, I can show you again the links in the description. There's just detail work in here. There's stuff going on in here. Some elements at the end here, super gross. Color changes here. And even into more recent examples, this was actually still after the academy. This was a wait assignment, but I still like putting in, if you see here, boxes are coming out. This is all hanky frame. It's all ridiculous. But I just like doing that stuff. And again, you can watch the whole thing if you want to. And this is one of the more recent ones where there's the, I'm not gonna spoil it, until now. So stuff like this. And again, I'm gonna spare you the whole thing, but this is the stuff that I like to put in, where it's just kind of the effects work of set pieces, I don't mean the ground frame by frame and stuff like that. I just like doing that type of work. But the big thing is, again, I'm not telling you to put all that stuff in there just because that's what you're supposed to do. I just like doing that stuff. And so far, that extra type of work, that mentality of going above and beyond, has served me well, knock on fake wood. I haven't gotten fired yet, but it has helped me in my career as an animator. And again, just to make it all clear, it doesn't mean that you should neglect your main animation. So if you do a weight lift or a creature flying, or whatever you have, you should concentrate on your main character and the main assignment, and that needs to be rock solid. Don't neglect that. So once you're done, and you think that's in a really good shape, you could go above and beyond and add more things. I mean, if the teachers are okay with that, it always depends on your situation. And again, ultimately, this is all very subjective. This is something that worked for me. This is something that I wanted to do. It worked with my schedule, my environments, the time that I had, and the passion that I wanted to put in. And that doesn't mean that that's something that you can do, that you're in the position to do. It's just a general piece of advice, hopefully based on some okay examples of how to approach a shot. And maybe thinking, what could I do that will set me apart in the quest of, you know, creating a good demo reel and finding a job somewhere. So to go all the way back, the title of this clip is This Should Be Your Goal. Again, I'm generalizing, and this is all dependent on your situation and what you can do, what you have time to do. You know, you might be super busy with family, couple jobs, maybe just one job, and then school on top of that, that's not easy. It's a lot of hard work. I'm not saying that you should give up all the other stuff that's important to you and really just focus a thousand percent on animation and neglect everything else. That's not what I'm saying. I just hope that you have enough passion for animation that you can go above the general assignment and produce something that you can be proud of and that can push yourself so that you learn more. Because if you're just staying on the average level in terms of this is the assignment, these are the points and that's all I'm gonna do. I think you're gonna have a really hard time standing out and crafting a reel that will grab the attention of recruiters or supervisors, whoever's looking at reel, for a hiring position. So whatever you can do to go above and beyond, I think it's gonna have so many benefits in the long run and ultimately that's going to be very, very satisfying. Again, it's very subjective. Let me know what you think, put that in the comments. You can totally disagree, say no, you're totally wrong. You should do it this way, absolutely valid, whatever your workflow is. I'm going to post more of these examples where I go specifically into one shot by an artist. It's kind of like an artist spotlight type of thing. But I'm gonna explain exactly why I like shots, the composition, the staging, the acting choices, why this shot stands out to me. Which again, I could be totally wrong, but these are the things that I like that I'm gonna take out of this shot and be inspired by that and hopefully in a way apply that when I do my work. So if you haven't already, like and subscribe, but also hit that bell so you get notified every time I upload a shot and I'm gonna be uploading almost every day and it's gonna be a lot of content. So I hope that you're gonna watch this and that you're gonna be inspired by it and you can learn from it. If you completely disagree and think this is absolute BS, let me know. Let me know in the comments. I love to have a discussion about this. This is not just me telling you what to do. I would love to know your opinion. And if you've watched until the very end, thank you very much and until the next clip.