If you're reading this, that means I already started my next term, Advanced Body Mechanics !
In this term we'll have to animate a couple of physical shots, revolving around one or several themes, in which we focus on getting good body mechanics (duh) and have to end up with a believable / entertaining performance.
I'm stoked about this term because my mentor is none other than Drew Adams, who worked on movies such as : The Croods, Kung Fu Panda 2, Rise of the Guardians and a lot more !
I already checked out his way of giving feedback and he's really thorough and honest in his critiques, that's why I picked him as a mentor and I'm really looking forward to work with him.
So the time has come again, end of term 2 and start of term 3 : Advanced Body Mechanics !!!
This time there is no break between terms so that means I have to stay sharp and get right back into action this week !
But first...
WEEK 12
Yet again we had to make a Progress Reel of what we've done this term, in order for our next mentor to see where we're at and for ourselves as well, to keep track of how we are evolving through this course.
Therefore I present to you my reel for 'Body Mechanics Basics with Rich Mckain'
And again, I had tons of fun this term, met a whole bunch of new students and had a blast with our mentor Rich Mckain.
Also want to say thanks to Jason Martinsen who did a couple of Q&A's with us when Rich was abscent ! Learned a lot from both of you guys...and now I'm even more pumped to continue my way through this course !
The last few weeks of this term were pretty damned buuuuuusy BUT super fun as well !
Why you ask ? Well, let me show you why !
In WEEK 7 - 11 we had to come up with a cool physical shot.
We had a lot of freedom in what kind of shot we wanted to do and were also given some options to consider. I went with combining a couple of options and kinda going for my own thing...
Since this was the first assignment where we could do something a bit more creative I wanted to challenge myself and try to nail down a nice performance.
I'm a big fan of action shots and especially parkour typed stuff, and I always wanted to animate something like this, so it was obvious for me to go for a kind off 'obstacle course / parkour' shot.
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So I'll walk you through my work process for this shot.
I started out with shooting REFERENCE and doing THUMBNAILS, exploring what I wanted to do and how I could show it to the audience.
Once I knew in what kind of direction I wanted to go, I made a rough LAYOUT of what my shot was supposed to look like. I focused mainly on modeling the environment and getting a good working camera for the action I had in mind. Then I went ahead and animated the root of my character in the simplest way to show the intention of the shot.
The next step was then BLOCKING my shot out and getting all my essential 'key' poses in there, working in my timing and already keeping in mind the flow of the movement.
As you might have noticed, I decided to work out the second shot since it would have been too much to finish both shots. I am however planning on animating that first shot as well, but again, when I have the time for it ! ^^
After this I went even further with my blocking and added BREAKDOWNS.
This step is essential to make your animation more clear and readable since you define your movements better by breaking them up into smaller pieces. This is also the good time to start checking spacing issues, tracking your arcs and pushing your poses even more. You clearly see that my initial blocking poses weren't working and I adjusted them while I was adding my breakdowns.
The week after I already had a solid blocking, and SPLINING it out was just a matter of working through it...although, it's never that easy !!!
I still bumped into some issues regarding spacing and posing so I tweaked a few things here and there. I also had some notes from my mentor and fellow students which I adressed as well.
Here are two weeks of successive splining.
And then it was finally time to start POLISHING, putting all the pieces together and coming up with a solid performance. In my splining stage I was still missing a big part at the end and some parts weren't working the way they should have, so with some notes from my mentor and that last push to finalize this baby I went in and put my last efforts into this shot.
So without further ado (it took some reading this time to get to this part of the post ^^), here's my final pass (and maybe it's better to watch this one on Youtube since I have the borders and all, sorry folks).
And looking at it now, I still see some areas to improve...but since I'm starting my third term right after this one I don't really have the time to fix it right away...
But y'all know, an animator's job is never finished !!!
We had to finish up our walkcycle and I had a lot of fun doing this !
And although I said I was going to add some secondary motion, due to time constraints I decided not to do this right now. But I might add some stuff later on to break the cycle effect and to give it something more interesting...but we'll see because for an exercise I think it had it's effect.
Maybe if it was something I'd want to use in a demoreel I'd spice things up a bit ;)
Pero anyways, here is my splined version of my sassy/sexy walk !
We also had to find some cool poses again, and this is what I came up with...
I'm happier with the first one because I really took some time to come up with a bit of backstory to make it more interesting ! So I'm going to try to think about this a lot more when I'm looking for appealing poses.
Apparently they made some really cool clips about all the different characters in 'Jack et la Mécanique du Couer', the feature film I worked on last year.
Although they're in French, it's still interesting to see the 'behind the screen' footage and to get a glimpse of the movie ;)
So it's that time again ^^
New class ! New people ! New assignments !
These first two weeks have been a blast so far. I met my fellow classmates and they are all eager to be in the body mechanics class to up their game and learn a ton of new tricks ! Also my mentor, Rich, who I've now seen a couple of times already on the Q&A is a really awesome guy and also very inspiring ! You can tell he's ready as well to push us to that next level ^^
WEEK 1
For the first week we had to get used to one of the new rigs Animation Mentor has, and that's Stella. She's a lovely girl who wants to be animated like crazy ! So in order to get used to this new type of rig we had to make a couple of poses that suggested 'movement'. I went with these two and kept in mind some things like silhouette, line of action, negative spaces and appeal of the character.
WEEK 2
In our second week we built further upon our previous walkcycles and prepared for our first full body walkcycle. You could chose if you wanted to do a vanilla walk or a walk with character. I went with the second one and came up with a sassy/sexy walk where Stella is smoking from a Cruella De Vil typed cigaretteholder.
We had to plan this out, shoot reference and turn in our blocking. And in that order, here's what I turned in ;)
I focused on getting the mechanics right first, and I'm going to add
the secondary action in there next week, after I got feedback on this ^^
Tomorrow I start my new term, this time it's Body Mechanics Basics where we will focus more on creating believable physical movement with entire characters.
I'm
really siked to start this new term, simply because this is a more
challenging aspect of animation and because I'll be mentored by none
other than Rich McKain, who worked on movies such as : Brave, Up, Toy Story 3, Horton and other awesome titles !!!
So expect to see some cool new updates pretty soon !
