My final assignment, the tap dance, is not as polished as it should be but I think I just need to leave it for a while.  I won’t be picking anything quite as needlessly challenging in the future; it’s simply too difficult to achieve a good result in the time allowed when you’re also trying to hold down a full-time job. I worked out that at the height of my AM activity so far, I was doing around 30 hours of work a week on AM and combined with a full-time 40-ish hour week at work, it was all getting a bit much!

In all seriousness, I’ve learnt an absolute (metric) tonne of stuff over the past 6 months and a large part of that can be placed at Shaun’s feet and the great critiques and fun Q&A sessions he’s conducted during my first two classes at Animation Mentor. From the cries of “GO TEAM!”, to the overuse of his new favourite phrase (“pants”) and even upto this evening’s jovial exploits, it’s been a great journey (or at least a very big part of one) and a great pleasure to have Shaun impart his top quality knowledge to us newbies!

SO THANK YOU SHAUN!

And with that, I bid you all a goodnight!

ps. If you pop back tomorrow, I should have my Class 2 Progress Reel posted for your enjoyment (or otherwise)!

So in theory, this is finished. I was genuinely concerned about the state it was in when I uploaded it to the website. It turns out that it was actually OK! I had a great critique from Shaun; he was generally very happy with it but since I had asked for some really specific pointers about how to make it better, he went through and gave me a few key frame numbers to go through and polish some more. So that’s what I’ll be doing with the remainder of this week – only have ’til Friday to get my revision in though!

I guess it really is difficult to step back from your work and look at it objectively. Something to bear in mind next time, anyway!

I started with the feet, then the body and finally the arms. Haven’t looked at the head, hands or knees (or eyes) yet (and I also haven’t been able to accentuate the ending yet either). This is the penultimate week – need to make some proper time to polish it up nicely!

I really need to start working more efficiently or something. I’ve lost 1.5 days of glorious British sunshine to this thing! I’m off to enjoy what’s left of the day!

So there you go! Hope you like it. I’m going to take a quick run at splining it before the hand-in tomorrow evening – what I’m hoping is that it isn’t going to be too tough because I’ve added all that detail! I’ll update you all tomorrow once I’ve done it and handed it in!

Shaun was really happy with my blocking (“probably the best blocking I’ve seen you do”, no less!) and didn’t have any major pose or time changes to suggest. The main thing was to really push the ups and downs of the hips to accentuate the moves, particularly things like the slide and the kick and try to extend some of the slower sections by a few frames/as much as possible.

The key pointers he had moving into the refinement stage next week were:

• Add in loads more detail to the blocking to really keep the feeling of the blocking as much as possible and make it that much less painful when switching to splines.
• Give more time to the ending (I’ve got plenty of frames to enable this).
• Try and keep the texture of the movement i.e. the fasts and slows, contrast between upper and lower body movements and speed etc.

These are all things I’ll be looking at when reblocking next week. I’ll just take my block and add loads of additional inbetweens/breakdowns and really concentrate on nailing down the timing and feeling of the feet. Stay tuned!

Right, so here is my final wallflip animation:

It was well received by Shaun, the main thing to sort out being the slightly too extreme spacing on the body just before Stewie lands. Hopefully I’ll get time to fix that before I have to put my progress reel together at the end of the term.

So, new task!

Being an idiot, I thought I’d go “all out” for the final task of the term. I picked something quite challenging:

Yes, I know. I. am. an. idiot. Well, I’m guessing it will be fun and painful in equal measures! Like I said, I wanted to finish the term with a bang, so what better way to do that than by near killing myself with a near impossible animation!

Here’s the Flipbook planning – there are a ton of poses!

The blocking stage next week is going to take me a very long time!

So, last week was pushing the poses, which I did. Now I have to go through and really push the spacing to make it feel weighty, explosive and much, much more appealling!

I was fairly happy with it as a starting point, but it was a little bit boring. Shaun (and pretty much everyone else that gave me feedback) suggested that I really need to move away from my reference and push the poses as much as possible. Hopefully you’ll see evidence of that next week ;)