Week 1! So it begins.

Well hello lovely people. Are you ready to dive back in? I certainly am. Let's get to it!

So for Week 1, it's all about planning. For the first three weeks of this term, we're working on our own personal shot to get used to the way things work this term. I wanted to do something challenging for this shot, so I looked all over YouTube for some cool physical actions I could animate. I found this one parkour-er (?) who dresses up like the main character from Assassin's Creed and runs around jumping off of things, flipping over stuff, and just generally being awesome. So, I decided to animate a flip from one of his videos, which you can see here:

As you can see, I also did a draw-over of my reference, which is my new favorite planning tool after having so much success with it last term! I didn't get as fancy with the color-coding but I hope you don't mind. 

Next, I put together a few pages of planning drawings, largely using my draw-over as a starting point. I wish I could have put more drawings in, but I started to run out of room! 

Mike had a few notes for me to keep in mind going into the shot, mainly to take out the camera movement, to really push the antics and compressions, and to maybe stage a few poses differently (namely the landing pose) so that Stewie's big head doesn't ruin the pose. Overall he said I'm in a good place to move forward, though I picked a very difficult shot. Flips are hard! But I'm excited for the challenge and can't wait to start blocking this thing in!

That's all for this week, folks. Come back next week for some actual animation, whoo! See you soon.

Week 1 - Turning It Around

Hello lovely readers and welcome to Class Two - Psychology of Body Mechanics! We're off and running here in week one, with our first assignment already underway.

The way this term is set up, we'll be working on more complicated shots for four weeks at a time, so by the end of the class we'll have three complete shots. For each shot, we have a list of physical actions to choose from, ranging from simple to more complex in terms of body mechanics. But first, I have an updated workspace photo for your eyeballs:

I moved into a new house during the break week and finally got a new desk in addition to my drafting one. So now I have a L shaped setup with my drafting desk on my left and I am loving it so far! And of course, my second monitor is still the light of my life. Animators of the world, dual monitors are a must, I'm telling you. You'll wonder how you ever got anything done without one.

Okay now WHO'S READY FOR SOME AWKWARD VIDEO REFERENCE? Good because you're about to see some. For my first shot this term, the action I chose was to have Ballie do an about face. I quickly found out that there is a lot going on in what seems like such a simple action. Part of our homework this week was to shoot video reference of ourselves doing the action, or else find some reference of someone doing the action. Since one of our proposed options was a roundhouse kick, I'm guessing a lot of people ran to YouTube to see what they could find but since I chose a very doable action, I decided to just shoot it myself on my phone.

After turning around for the camera about a half dozen times, I decided on this take. I liked the rhythm and casual-ness of the timing and I think the foot placement is more interesting than anything I could have come up with out of my head.

For the other half of our homework, we had to submit 2-3 pages of planning sketches to help us when we start blocking our shots in next week. This part was actually really fun. Marlon shared with us that when he does planning thumbnails, he usually starts by tracing key poses from his video reference in Photoshop, and then refining the drawings from there. I really liked this method as a starting point and used it for my thumbnails here. After tracing off my reference, I redid the drawings to match Ballie's proportions a bit better and pushed the poses a bit more. 

Please forgive my little kid handwriting. During my move last week, I found a bunch of school work from elementary school and my handwriting has seriously not improved since I was twelve. Maybe I really should have been a doctor, huh?

Since I had a bit of extra time this week I also did a pencil test of my shot as well. I wanted to check how my timing felt and I like to practice my 2D skills whenever I get the chance. 

The timing of it feels a little mushy to me now watching this back but I think it may be partly because in some spots I needed really tight inbetweens and I didn't quite pull it off correctly. 2D is something I really want to get better at while I'm at AM so I'm going to try and do pencil tests along with my planning whenever I can.

Well, that's it for Week One! I'll be back next week with my first pass at blocking my shot in so stick around!