Session 7: Arcs with a 1-Leg character

This week's assignment is about emphasis on arcs, to add fluidity to our characters and feel them organic, since pretty much everything moves along arcs. Again, the lecture has been very informative and funny with Carlos Baena examples, in particular the one with his car, which is called "The Black Firecracker".

Session 6: Tailor; "frame by frame revision"

Ahh! This is the difference that "polishing" your animation frame by frame gives you. With this procedure, you are able to stop, evaluate and correct every single frame until you get what you want. Takes a lot of time though, that's why I wanted to have a short animated piece, I knew that I wanted to go frame by frame since the beginning of this week and not let the computer do all the work for me.

Compare it to the one below!

Session 6: Animating Tailor

Whoever came up with this idea for the character is a genius! I love it!! And what a nice way for us the students to tackle this follow-through principle. It's so much fun to animate and has a tremendous potential, I'm happy!!

Here my second animation pass, I would still go back and refine it. I wanted to keep it short so I could go frame by frame on it.

Comments?

Session 6: Overlapping action

The lecture on overlapping action is pretty cool, these guys are full of ideas on how to communicate the same thing from different angles. No wonder they have the legend "Next Education" at the end of their lectures, times changes dude!!

Here is my planning for Tailor, the bouncing ball with a tail that resembles a squirrel. I didn't plan any of the follow-through action, just some poses here and there, the timing is for the ball, the main shape, the leading force.

Session 5: obstacle course

Whoa! What an assignment, its very difficult!!! It took me a while to get the main blocking (what you see now) about 2 hours straight. I was so disappointed to see my final timing, in particular the ending frame number!!! Its way more than I planned on paper, doh!!

Session 5: planning for the obstacle course

This is my initial planning, I like to get it down to the frames, what's going on mainly with the spacing of the ball, but!!! When I moved into Maya an hour later I needed to push the timing way off of what I initially expected!! That made me realize how far away I was from the final timing, boo!!!

Session 5: Devastation Pose v3

What about something like he just got some bad news? and takes his hands to his head as a reaction.

How's this one?

Session 5: Devastation Pose v2

After looking at the first one, (I thought I might be using too many props, the whole environment which helps to see why he feels that way). I want to express the feeling just with body language.

How's this for you?

Session 5: Devastation Pose

This is a very tough assignment for me, there is so many ways of expressing this feeling and at the same time I found just two that might work.

This is my first idea

Q & A week 4

Interesting Q&A with Bret, this is what she pointed out:

-Timing is the essence of the scene, it has to be dead on.
-When you are planning your animation, add more frames than what you think.
-Bret never listens to music while animating, in particular when timing out a scene.
the only exception is when she is doing something extremely technical or a repetitive job. (somebody asked her about it, making reference to the Richard Williams book)

cool eh?

Session 4: Light & Heavy Ball

For this assignment we are asked to have 2 balls on the same shot, a light and a heavy ball or referred as a basket ball and a bowling ball to have a better understanding of the physics involved.

This is the second animation pass, I still have to work on the rotations a bit more.

Session 3: Soccer ball

What do you know?? Back to the bouncing ball assignment! Bobby Beck mentioned that even if you have a lot of experience, the bouncing ball is an exercise that shows your work habits, good or bad ones.

Yet! no Squash and Stretch or Perspective is required for this assignment.

PS, Thanks Matt for your comments on the rotation ;)

Session 3: Trophy fixed #2

You push too hard Darlings!!! and I like it! so here is the straight left leg ;)

Session 3: Trophy fixed

Here is the fixed pose based on Mark Pullyblank, Freddie Burgos and Terry Kalinich,
the arms could be stretched out instead of being bent (It was struggling with the trophy's weight) and the head could be facing front to the crowd as Freddie suggested. Stu's head is huge and is hard to get it inbetween his arms, so I just tilted a bit.

Session 3: Gimme more!

So this is a third and final idea, it has to be different from the other poses, since I'm in the search for the best way to portray excitement.

What do you think?

Session 3: More excitement needed

Then I went off to find a motivation to be excited for, so I added a little prop to portray what Stu had in mind. Also went for a *jumping* pose to see if this would help to project his attitude.

Session 3: Excitement pose

I thought this one was going to be more easy, but as I was doing some sketches and later on posing Stu, I wasn't really projecting the excitement on the character that I wanted to.

I didn't want to go for a **jumping** or **strecthed out** pose, I wanted something more subtle. But its hard!