Class 1 Final Countdown

Greetings all!

It's hard to believe I am at the end of class 1 already. Time flies when you're living your dream and it's great to share it and have it all in this space.

My Mentor Bryan has been amazing this term and has always steered me in the right direction with detailed notes and given fantastic advice, and he is just an awesome guy as well. I couldn't have asked for a better kickstart and it is always a rush to feel that you have improved over time and am making your way to where you want to be.

Here is a progress reel (AM archives all our work) I'm sure my next mentor will be interested to see what I've been up to!

Enjoy

I'm jumping right into Class 2 next week with a new mentor and some great animation tests in Psychology of Body Mechanics!

There is much more hard work and twice the fun ahead so keep staying along for the ride

Cheers

Yin and Yang

Heyhey!

As the title might suggest this week I drew and moved Stu around to the very cool theme of Balance.
Finding reference was very rewarding and I found myself investigating everything from beam balancing to ballet to yoga.

 There is something graceful about our body adapting to imbalance using our muscles and the knowledge of our own bodies.

The Two Week Sneak

Cue the pink panther music, because I'm going from plain vanilla to interestingly sneaky!

These two weeks I worked on a personality walk, building on what I learned on the standard vanilla walk and adding character and switching up the timing up some.

As you can see I've still got those main key poses and then I also mapped out my inbetweens in green to give me the best possible chance of getting the swift lift and careful step motion. This is immediately apparent as you can see the passing position is in this walk the most extreme down. Here's my blocking phase

I really enjoyed pushing the poses (stretching and squashing some in the right places) and especially telling the whole story with just that contact pose. I gained a lot of experience and am really starting to get the locomotion of the hips, how they rotate and all axis and compensate and shift weight side to side. And all this changes with the type of character,emotion and personality we're dealing with!

Here's what I ended up with

Take a Breather

Here are some poses I think we can all relate to, after a big day or a giant project or a week of doing the same thing over and over we are in an utter state of exhaustion. These fellas are out of gas, deflated, struggling or even entirely limp.

Number 1 and 7 were very much inspired by toddlers and little kids, the way they seem to just crash once they're ready for a good 'ol nap. "Any place will do, and on my face will be just fine:) "
(Sleepy drunks also have this attribute, but kids are more cute)

I love the idea of being so exhausted but still having the will to go where you need to be.
"I have to support myself I'm almost there"

Don't Look So Worried

More poses coming your way!

And the theme for this one was Concern, and it is certainly one that is much more subtle to effectively achieve. There are also different degrees of concern, varying from deeply distraught to mildly worried. It proved a bit of a challenge without the aid of facial expressions, but was a lot of fun.

As with acting and performance the head is very important and where the character is looking can really add to everything that is going in that moment, showing some internal thought and inner dialogue
I went with number 7 because I liked the idea of pacing and the character thinking and weighing up options.
"How can I fix this?" "What is going to happen next?" "Maybe if I do this? or that?"

Giving Stu a Medical Degree seemed appropriate;)

Remember to Stretch

Heyhey,

Here I've got some more poses I got down! The theme for the week was physical strength, so it was really fun to try an really get a sense of strain or an interesting centre of gravity within the drawings. I have actually begun exercising more regularly as of late, and so it was rather fitting in really getting the essence for the idea of strength!

As with many good poses, I realized the theme lended itself to curved lines meeting with straight lines. That general combination is appealing to the eye and makes the action that is occurring that much more clearer, since this is a exaggeration of something that actually happens when we do these exercises.

The one I went with actually turned out better than the original drawing, and makes really good compositional sense:)
See how everything draws a curve or line straight back to the head? definitely one of my favourites so far 

Step By Step

Hey All!
It's been a while since I've typed up a post, and I think it is definitely about time for an update. Week 8 I jumped straight into creating a vanilla walk, which is essentially a walk without personality. Just a plain step step step. It is of course not so plain to animate.

Walks are one of the more difficult things to get right, since it involves every moving mechanic within our body and every moving part is influenced by another (As I've touched on with the overlapping action and the importance of the hips when we are in motion). A great way to have looked at the walk and the best way to apply the principles of animation is to see it as a bouncy ball. Yes indeed!

In fact that's exactly the point of ballie here. As with the bouncy ball, we have our ups and downs with the appropriate ease ins and ease outs and squash and stretch (not just of the shape but through the compression of the limbs as well).

As illustrated by my planning you can see a walk consists of 4 main poses. If we were to change some of these poses up into different extremes we can get some pretty interesting walks, but for now we want something basic. Here is my blocking for the cycle; note how you can tell exactly what the walk is like without any inbetweens or smoothing

And then finally the polished version with all the breakdowns and inbetweens in place