So I bet you’re interested to know how my blocking went, aren’t you? Well I did take some days off last week, just to make sure I managed to get through the huge bulk of poses needed to make this thing work. Turns out those days off were very helpful:

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!