Animation mentor Q2 ASN3 Backflip Blocking02

After last assignment I was determined to get my blocking in splines this week, so I had more time to clean them up and figure out how to keep nice hold and get smooth splines. Try and get that elusive "A."

This week I decided I wanted to add some work with the hands because nice hand animation always really wows me so I added a brush off after he gets up. I first Shot reference for the end of the shot.

Based off of the reference I drew these panning sketches.

I added these keys to the blocking, which went really smoothly and added a few additional break downs. I had thought it was going to get complicated and messy for some reason, but it was pretty straight forward.

This week I got into refining, I decided to post the stepped key blocking as well as the refining because I think the Blocking looks stronger in stepped keys. Though after I spend some more time cleaning up splines and and working on some of the timing I think it will be pretty good. Though I do like the feel of stepped keys for some reason, feels more like 2d animation which is awesome.

AM Quarter 2 Assignment 3 blocking01

I have discovered that I love blocking out animation. I was unaware of this before. Now when I do it it feels more like sketching for movement, where I am feeling out the piece that can later be finished, which is also my favorite part if drawing too. Hopefully the more I do this the better I will be at polishing my scenes comes to me, right now I still feel that i don't quiet have the knack of that.

AM Quarter 2 Assignment 2 Polish and Assignment 3 planning

This week was a lot of work, I should have taken my blocking into splines last week, however, I wanted Chad's opinion on what I had before I did. Had I splined out my animation last week I would have found I had not blocked it very well for splining, because I had changed the poses in the spine in inconstant ways. So I had to delete the whole spine and redo it. It took me a long time to commit to deleting the spine, but in the end I think it was the only way to go. I was much happier with my blocking then I am with the final product. I lost some of my holds that I really liked and the timing changed too into something that just wasn't as punchy. I mainly focused on trying to have nice arcs and smooth animation. I hope chad has some good feed back on how I can work the animation and make it punchier. I learned a lot from this one that I feel will help me a lot in the next assignment.

I originally wanted to do hop on one leg and fall down. But I felt it would end up being too similar to my last one. Plus I had some trouble when it came to splining this one so I wanted something straightforward. So I decided to do a back flip off a box (yes for some reason I feel a backflip is easier then a fall) so I went to Youtube and looked for back flips off a building. I combined 2 videos for my reference, for some reason, all the really good back flip videos cut out the part where the guy anticipates the jump off the building.

From The video I made some planning sketches. In the end I may need some more, but this time I am going to try and keep my blocking less detailed and watch the splines.
I broke those down into the individual Keys and breakdowns.

I feel pretty confident in my ability to pull this off. Going to try and get a lot of blocking done next week so that I am able to spend more time cleaning up the animation.

AM Quarter 2 Assignment 2 blocking02

This week I had a substitute mentor, because Chad was on vacation after wrapping up the movie he was working on. The sub I had was Jay Davis who was amazing, he worked for Disney for a while and now he has decided to pursue painting. He is a Erotic Surrealist, and his paintings are spectacular, I really enjoy them. He was a great mentor to have this week because laughed at my animation which was awesome, usually them mentors are so stoned faced it was nice to get a reaction out of him. He also had alot of great insight into my scene about having some texture to the animation, meaning having actions with different speeds and intensities happening in the same shot. I feel I ended up with a much stronger piece because of it and I know next assignment that I will be thinking more about texture and timing. Though because I needed to change so much I didn't feel confident in taking it out of stepped mode before turning it in. Though I have so many keys and break downs it shouldn't be that intense to spline it out.

Animation Mentor Q2 ASN Drunk Stumble Blocking01

After getting some great notes from my mentor Chad Sellers, I changed some of my actions to meet his notes. Which lead to a better more entertaining animation, feel. I went with the pose to pose blocking on 1s and then spaced them out. The only problem I had was that I made a lot of keys which made it so I had not alot of wiggle room when it came to timing.

I posted this on my public review and showed it to Laura. I didn't get much response from the public review. Laura told me that the big step towards the end wasn't working for her, it took 50 frames to do it and I was unsure about the movement so I got rid of it. This solved alot of my timing problems and gave me the extra frames that I needed to pad the changes in direction.

I looked at my planning critique from last week again and I got a couple of new ideas but they are all long the same lines of what I already have, so I will save those for next week if what I have going this week isn't working. I exaggerated every movement with the knowledge that I could tone it down later. I look forward to getting my critique next week.