• 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!

Here we are then! New class, new mentor, new assignment! Pantomime! The art of acting without dialogue! Being given dialogue can often be a nice safety cushion to fall back on; it already has a lot of the beats/phrases and timing “pre-programmed” into it based on the way the dialogue has been read. None of that namby-pamby hand-holding here, oh no!

For this assignment we must create a scenario where Stewie goes from one emotional state to another. Ideally you want to pick two very contrasting emotions so you can really sell the difference when the time comes! I did have a few other ideas, but the premise I came up with is:

“Sneaky Stewie has seen a delicious apple and going to steal it. He sneaks up and checks around to see that no one is looking. He grabs the apple and is very pleased with his acquisition.

Of course, once he takes a closer look he sees that the apple is currently inhabited by a worm. It turns out Stewie is incredibly squeamish. In abject horror, Stewie jumps, dropping the apple on the ground and has a comedic, squeamish reaction to what he nearly ate!”

Now, what do I mean by “comedic, squeamish reaction”? Well, I was imagining something like this:

Yes. Indeed! Although I was reasonably pleased with my acting choices, I (and a number of people posting comments on my video) felt that it could use a bit more refinement and some better timing so begrudgingly I went back to shoot a little bit more reference and came away with something a lot better:

So there’s a tip for you! If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again! Even though Michelle wanted us to do one good take with no cutting or splicing of footage, I’ve still kept a few alternate takes and clips from the previous session as they had elements that I liked a lot (take a look at the reaching pose when I go for the apple in the final two takes – the pose is so much stronger!).

I was also pretty torn over whether to have Stewie appear from behind the tree or whether to get him on-screen a whole lot fast and use a bendy, cartoony slide in from screen-right as well. For now, I’m going with the slide in. One of the things I want to explore this term is a cartoony animation style (something I haven’t really done before) so I want to really push my poses where possible!

Here are my planning sketches:

So despite what I just said I know these poses can be pushed a lot further, I’m just not very good at drawing OK? Michelle’s main criticism for this week was that the hips are very neutral throughout the poses and she’s right. I really need to exaggerate the poses and exaggerate the hip rotations to show the weight properly.

If you’ve got any crits, comments or questions I’d love to hear them! Otherwise, it’s onto Week 2 and blocking out the shot!!