Week 2 - Blocking!

Hello lovelies! I hope you are having a good week and are just excited as me about all this fall weather. For Week two we dove right into Maya to block our shots in. So GET EXCITED!

In our lecture this week, we had a workflow demo from Dimos Vrysellas, who had originally been trained as a 2D animator. Because of his traditional animation training, his approach to blocking was still largely the same as it had been when he was doing 2D. Throughout the lecture, he urged us to treat every key you set as if it's a drawing. In fact, he still refers to his keys as "drawings". For me, this approach was eye opening.

First, he laid down a posing pass, which focused solely on the storytelling poses with no mind paid to the timing. Using the comma and period keys in Maya, he flipped and rolled his keys, the same as a traditional animator would do with his or her pegged paper on animation board. After that, he started a new pass just to work out the timing of the shot, sliding the keys around in the timeline until it felt right.

I've always flipped my keys when blocking, but the idea to do a pass that focused only on posing was a powerful new idea for me. In the past I've usually focused on posing and timing equally in one pass, but for this assignment, I tried Dimos' method of separating them into two passes and I found it extremely useful. I think it really helped the clarity of my shot. Plus, timing it out doesn't seems so scary when your poses are already singing. But here see for yourself!

Something else that was stressed in this week's lecture was to be very thorough in your posing, even in your initial blocking. Don't shy away from putting in overlap, follow through and pay attention to things like foot placement, toe drag, ease-ins, ease outs and holds. I took that to heart and as a result, this is definitely the most thorough blocking pass I've ever done and I'm quite happy with it. Splining this shot seems waaaay less scary.

Well that's all for me this week, loves. Though I will leave you with a little teaser of what's to come: I'm cooking up a little side project in the form of a new blog. I'll update here as things get rolling so keep your eyes open! See you next week.