Animation Mentor - Week 10 & 11

Hi boys and girls,

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 !

We also had to do our last pose, balance. 

And I decided to got with a more 'cliché' understanding of balance, but I'm happy with it.

Thanks for reading and cheerios !