And here’s my final polish pass from Week 11. Obviously the lip sync hasn’t been fully fleshed out as that’s part of Term 5′s workload:

It became clear to me as I was muddling my way through the first two weeks of the assignment that I had really not planned out my work as well as I normally do and as such I was floundering around trying to make it up as I went along. I think the way the first week’s assignment (planning) is laid out is also partially responsible for that too; coming up with a number of different ideas and then taking one straight into blocking the next week – it doesn’t feel like there’s time to really tie the idea down and plan it out fully before having to get started on the blocking (although clearly, you should!).

Anyway, I completely scrapped everything I’d done in the first two weeks of blocking and started from scratch (it was actually very cathartic), did new planning sketches based on the old reference and started blocking and re-blocking again. It still probably isn’t quite as far along as it should be at this stage but please bear in mind that I have tried to fit 3 weeks’ worth of work into 1!

Firstly, I went back to my old reference and really studied it properly. I also drew in some overlays to help try and establish the golden poses:

From there I drew some new planning sketches to replace the rather lacking ones from Week 6:

And from that, here’s the new version of my shot. For clarity: I’ve put all three stages of the work into one video. There’s the refining, reblock and blocking. The reblock is definitely what I spent most of my time on after I got the initial blocking stage out of the way. The refining shot at the start of the video is a VERY quick splining pass just to see how it would look smoothed – in fact, I will probably go back to the Re-block and start splining again next week.

I’m much happier with the shot now – I think it’s considerably better than it was before! I’ve been working ridiculously hard this week – hopefully the work proves it!

ps. Yes, I’m going to upload and back-date the terrible work from the first two weeks of this assignment along with the final version of my pantomime shot, which I’ve just realised I didn’t post way back when!

Oh and I nearly forgot, we had to do a new hand pose:

There’s a little too much tension in the thumb and Michelle thought I could have grouped the middle and ring(?) finger together a little bit more. Other than that, I’m pretty happy with it, especially because it’s so damn hard to get a decent hand pose out of this model/rig!

We also had to do a hand pose that would convey anger:

Michelle thought there wasn’t enough tension in the fingers and I’d agree, however I have no real idea about how to achieve that! It’s not helped by the fact that the rig in the hands is awful and we can’t edit the skinning. Just trying to get a pose that didn’t look really bad was tough enough!

Here’s the video reference:

And sketches for Clips 4 and 2:

The sketches are pretty quick and dirty (and photographed rather than scanned) as I’m in Florence this weekend to see Marie! More next week!

Let me know what you think! Comments, suggestions and questions are always welcome!

And here it is splined. It’s OK but I spent a very long time re-blocking, so I didn’t get a lot of time to clean the curves:

• Tip the ankle of the SL leg to improve the line of action (FRM15).
• Do something with the SR arm. The hand pose is ugly (FRM24).
• Tip forwards more during the look. See if you can push the weight forwards a little more (FRM45).
• Remove the SR leg step. Keep it back and then slide it round the tree to catch up with the rest of the body (FRM85).
• When grabbing the apple, make sure we see the hand near the apple before it grabs. Also have Stewie look at the apple before he goes to grab it.
• To convey the physical act of grabbing the apple: Once the hand is on the apple do a slight anticipation up, a quick jerk down, stop and then continue the motion into the ‘looking’ phrase. Maybe add a slight twist to the hand motion as well.
• Watch the positioning of Stewie during the squeamish section; at the moment he’s too aligned with the edge of the tree and it’s visually distracting.
• Add around another 8 frames of squeamish action.
• For the squeamish quivers, add loads of keyframes (on 1s and 2s). Small movements at a high frequency.
• The exit poses need more work; at the moment they’re too upright. The spine and legs are currently a bit boring (~FRM207).
• Make the tilt forward even more extreme (~FRM210).
• In general, try and have a bit more fun with the end section. Play with it a little more and get a bit more energy into it. It’s too literal at the moment; look to the earlier sections of the animation for inspiration!

So there you have it! Plenty of stuff to sort out and not many days to do it. Oh well! Here we go…!

I tried to cover all the notes from the great critique last week. The one main I couldn’t manage was the increased time during the squeamish “Oooo” section near the end. I didn’t have enough time (that’s two weeks in a row now where I’ve not had my critique until Wednesday) and I’m also concerned about making my shot too long because of all the fiddly refining I’m going to have to do over the next few weeks.

Also, I’ve set up the apple constraints and blocked in the animation. The worm is built, rigged and working but I’m going to block the movement in next week once the apple animation is ready.

Here are a few additional notes that I want to address this week:

• I’m having trouble conveying the physicality of actually picking the apple. It would be nice to get a small tug in there, like he’s actually plucked the apple from the tree. I’m thinking it might be easier to switch to IK for that part.
• I’ve been trying to work out what to do with the screen-right (SR) foot during the sliding section (around FRM95-110) and most of the things I’ve tried to do with the leg have just resulted in knee pops! I think it’s working OK for now but I feel like I need a more elegant solution.
• Finally, I’m wondering if I should I start putting in the squeamish “quivers” in the arms and hands this week or if that’s more a polishing task? Hopefully Michelle will address that when my critique lands.

Has anyone got a good method for doing shakes or is it just put in lots of keys and jiggle them about in the graph editor? Haven’t really done that before!

Have a great week everyone!

It may not look it, but this animation is quite the milestone – it really represents my first foray into the world of cartoony animation! Hopefully it’s looking OK. It was fairly obvious, even before I got my critique, that there was a fairly major issue at FRM98 (of course, I didn’t spot it at 4am on Sunday morning*)!

I didn’t get my critique until yesterday morning, which once again doesn’t give me loads of time this week but my enthusiasm was boosted somewhat because the critique from Michelle was really great. I got LOADS of notes, so there is plenty to fix but overall she seemed very positive and I’ve got a great idea of what to tackle and in what order. To sum up her points:

• Beware of locking out the legs during the stretch frames. Break them in the opposite direction if it helps the line of action.
• Add an breakdown between FRM19 and 21 to better define what’s happening with the spine and head.
• Drag the screen right arm from FRM21 into position at FRM24  instead of taking it high and back away from the screen.
• Make the sneaky looks more involved and exaggerated. Perhaps just make one very extreme and just make the other one a little more obvious – get the whole body involved in the movement!
• At FRM98, bring the head/body in a downwards arc to avoid the clunkiness of the spine reversal.
• Keep the eyes on-screen whilst Stewie is looking at the apple.
• Have Stewie jump higher during the initial shock (around FRM163).
• Double the length of time Stewie spends being disgusted but get him off-screen faster.
• Exaggerate the angle of the spine during the run off-screen. Add some more tilt and really push the lines of action. Consider flailing the arms behind him as he leaves screen left.

Pretty comprehensive right? Well, it’s definitely useful to have all this to refer back to and get a better idea of how to improve the shot. Time to re-block this baby, taking all this stuff into account – then we’re onto splining the bastard!

*Yes, I may have stayed up very late trying to get the shot finished so I could go and see UP with the rest of the AM crew! It was freakin’ awesome, but I’m hoping to get some time to write about both UP and “Cloudy…” in the near future!

Thanks for reading, hope you found it interesting. Comments, questions or suggestions are always welcome!