First up is the prep work. After studying the video reference I came up with the below key poses.
From there I moved into the early blocking stage. My main attempt on this assignment was to go for a more extreme cartoon feel. Attempting to be reminiscent to the motion of the early Looney Tunes. Very quick movements followed by long holds. In this case I had quick tugs to the box followed by a hold with the arms extended. My first pass was over done. Too many fast poses and it looked jerky. I took out a few tugs and added a few frames to smooth it out a little. Below is the end result.
The final assignment for theme 1 and theme 2 preproduction shares the same week. While putting on the final touches for theme 1 I was getting ready for theme 2. Once again I was in front of a camera acting out the shots I will use. While I do feel a bit awkward doing these extreme gestures on film it comes in very handy later. Note the pads on the ground! The character in the shot takes a fall. Since I am using my reference to call upon it means I needed to really take the fall. I had my wife throw wadded up news papers at my face to represent the ball. Several falls and wadded newspaper to the face later I think you could actually read the copy on my face. You could say I was "read in the face" *bud dum chshshshs!*. But I digress...
Just as I did for theme 1 I sketched out the key poses from the reference video that I will use to set up my rough animation.
Below is the finished version. I have to warn that YouTube does not play it very smooth as the original. However with that said there are a few small pops that are still in the animation that I will have to go back and polish off when I get time. I worked on this project in clamped mode this time instead of stepped. So I was able to see full movement and avoid as much as possible running into gimbal lock.
Here are the story sketches for class 3's first assignment. I decided to pick a theme involving tennis. I first filmed reference of the action I will be animating. Then I studied the shot over and over. Next I picked out where the key frame poses are in the video. From there I sketched up those poses.
Below if the finished version. It has a few rough patches that if time permits I would like to go back in and fix. The main problem was all the Gimbal lock issues I had. The definition of gimbal lock can be found here. What it means to me in this case. All loss of control over the arms. It is a but that has to be dealt with in cg. You have to go in to every frame and re-position the arms to where the need to be. Sounds easy but it can be labor intensive. With that said I spent a lot of time correcting this problem rather than polishing it up. Part of this problem is I waited too long to go into spline mode. A lesson learned for the next assignment.
Had my first session for class 3! My mentor this time around will be Joe Mandia. He currently is working in video games but has an extensive film career as well. From just this session it looks as if he has a lot of fun in class. Not to be confused with the quality of work expectations. From his opening lecture I can tell this is going to be very challenging.
This time around we get to pick the actions for our assignments. We will have 3 total assignments. We have two choices. Ani-Jam or Ani-Excersize. The first is selecting a theme for all three from a list provided. One example of a theme is boot camp. We now have props to choose from! So if one was to choose boot camp they can now select obstacles provided to interact with. I have a lot of choices that I need to buckle down on and decide on. Class went smooth and looks like I will have a live bunch of peers. Which is always great because you get to feed off the energy!.
