Ok new term, new classmates, same mentor, same stress! Thankfully this class, whilst more difficult in terms of the actual animation work we have to produce, isn’t quite as… intense as Class 1. Or at least I hope not. Last class we often had to do planning and the execution of an animation as well as pose sketching and recreating it on Stu! In Class 2, we get 4 weeks to produce a single piece of body mechanics animation, which tends to breakdown as follows:

• Week 1 – Video reference and planning
• Week 2 – Blocking out the animation
• Week 3 – Move out of blocking
• Week 4 – Final polish

So we won’t be producing nearly the same volume of work (but I suspect the amount of time we need to spend on it will be more if nothing else). There were quite a few different actions we could animate for this first exercise and I decided to do: ‘Jump up and turn 180 degrees in the air and land/settle’ but put my own ‘spin’ (sorry) on it, so that it wasn’t just happening on the spot. Here, check out the balletic action!

Very graceful I’m sure you’ll agree! Based off that, I decided to try my hand at using Flipbook to block out all my key poses and get a rough idea of the timing for the animation (naughty me, getting ahead of myself!). Now, bear in mind that this is pretty much the first time I’ve ever done 2D animation, combined with the fact that Flipbook can be a little temperamental when it wants to be:

Not too bad, right? Theoretically at least, I ought not to have started timing it out but it was a really useful exercise and it will certainly be of great help when it comes to doing the proper blocking in Maya next week!

These are the sketches I produced off the back of my Flipbook animation:

I annotated it with all the notes I made when studying my video reference – stuff to bear in mind as I’m animating in later weeks. And I also used the key psoes for the jump to get a rough guide of the arcs for the feet whilst in the air:

So, how was my eCritique? Wonderful! Got the all-clear from Shaun. He was very happy I’d decided to start looking at Flipbook for my planning and roughing out the timing for the animation and his main comments revolved around really taking a look at the key poses and really pushing them as far as possible to maximise contrast and visual interest. I also have to try and really make the most of the nice overlapping action I have in the legs during the jump itself.

On to Week 2 and BLOCKING!