So right now I'm inbetween terms at Animation Mentor and we're having a 3 week break from classes to relax and to focus on things other than animation for a while !
Being an artist, you can put so much of your time into work and getting better that sometimes you forget all the rest that's going on in your life, so it's good to have some free time to spend with friends and families (especially during the holidays ! ^^).
WEEK 12
So... the last week we had to make a Progress Reel with all our assignments bundled together, so it's easy for ourselves and for our future mentor to see where you're at in terms of skills and knowledge. So without further ado here's mine ^^
I had a lot of fun this term, and although I already knew a lot about the principles of animation, I think it was great that I revisited them and focused on them individually on all these assignments ^^
I also met a lot of great people along the way and I want to thank my mentor Ray Chase for being an awesome guy and mentor ! We had a lot off laughs and I found it very interesting to talk in-depth about some of the shots you've done and movies you worked on ! I hope we meet again in the future ;) !
Found some cool comparison reels From Jason Martinsen and Jeff Gabor, very interesting to see how these guys go about shooting references for their shots ! Some of them are already older but it's nice to watch them again ^^
It's been a while again, but here's a "small" update on the last weeks of Class 1 : Animation Basics
These last weeks we focused mostly on walks and we finished our vanilla walk and started working on a character walk. Which was more of a challenge and where I noticed (again) that you really can make or break your animation depending on the usage of the principles ! (more on this in week 11)
WEEK 10
This week's lecture was all about the walk, and how you can put more character in your walks etc...
Here's my revision of the vanilla walk. I fixed the issue with the feet but I still feel that there's something wrong in the forward translation of the body...something I'll focus on more if I have to do a walk again in the future.
Our pose this week had to convey 'exhaustion' so I went ahead and tried to pose out some stuff in front of the camera myself and found a pose that I was happy about. I ended up turning this in ^^
We also had to block out our PERSONALITY WALK .
I decided to go for a walk that wasn't a cycle, and went for a challenging drunk walk.
Because I started my blocking really late and didn't have that much time, I wanted to make it easier for myself and went ahead and shot some reference to facilitate the planning of my walk. This was fun to do and provided me with a good basis to start my animation from.
On the other side, I also ended up sticking too close to my reference which resulted in a not so entertaining performance (something I realised after whatching my first playblast).
But time wasn't on my side and I had to turn it in like this.
REFERENCE:
I added the white belt to accentuate my hip movement.
BLOCKING:
Also the fact that it's only from the side view makes it more difficult to see what's happening.
I wasn't happy with this so I decided to reblock this shot the next week.
WEEK 11
This week's lecture was about EXAGGERATION, and after seeing this I immediatly knew what was wrong with my animation ! It's was just not pushed enough and I stayed too close to the real motion that I lost all the entertainment value, so...
REBLOCK:
...I decided to reblock my animation and I really tried to push my poses and ideas further !
Also the perspective view made it more readable.
SPLINING:
And then after some feedback from my peers I went straight into splining.
I'm pretty happy with it but there's still room for improvement, especially on the end jump and some of the hip movement inbetween the steps !
