Animation Mentor - Class 2 - Week 7 / 11 (Physical shot)

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 !!!

Cheerios and thanks for reading !