#class02

Class 2 - Task 5 Stealth 

Planning

It's the middle of december right now, which means that Class 02 of Animaiton Mentor is over.

These past few weeks have been really tough, especially week 09 where I translated my blocking to spline, but I'm jumping ahead of myself.

Week 07. The final week for the dog walk and the first one for the "big assignment". The task was to come up with some idea for a heavily body mechanics based animation somewhere between 150 and 250 frames and create video references and planning sketches for it.

I decided to make Stan flee out of a castle. He runs around the corner into the corridor, up the stairs, to the gate. Pushes it open and runs away.

I wanted to challenge myself here and thought I knew how much work this was gonna be. Well, I was wrong. I was not prepared for the amount of labor that was awaiting me.

Here's me video reference:

And some sketches:

Week 08. Finally all other assignments are done and I can completely focus on creating this piece. While that is still a lot of work it feels good to focus on one thing alone.

Blocking actually went relatively fast. While this still means about 10 hours having the proper video reference makes a ton of difference. At many stages of the run I could actually copy the poses and timing and make all those subtle changes in blocking+ and splining.

Week 09. My nemesis. This was the week of transition from blocking to splining, and boy is it a lot of work. I spent almost 30 hours on this weeks work just to have my mentor tell me I actually took it too far. The task was to create a completely splined "temp animation" state, whereas I already took it halfway through polish.

One thing I disregarded this week was to create a proper linear pass before going to bezier curves, that made everything that much harder. Well, lesson learned.

The feedback I got at this point from my mentor was amazing. He was very pleased with my effort as am I.

Week 10 and 11. Those were the final weeks of the assignment. Both titled to be "polishing".

I got tons of great feedback form Ryan about the most useful things like "add some more bunce here", "reduce impact there", "watch out for knee popping the sticking", "make this step longer and that one shorter", and so on.

While this may sound tedious it's a great way to train your eye for those subtle things and be reminded of all the tiny details that make an animation. Working alone I tend to get stuck with "Well, I guess it's alright now, isn't it?"

It means a lot to get professional feedback and I'm quite happy with where it got me. Here's my final:

And this wraps up Class 02. Class 03 will begin in January. The main topic will still be "Body Mechanics" but mixed with a bit of personality.