That said, I feel a little better having had my critique:

Girl

At the moment, she seems overly cautious. There are ways to make her seem more excited about the possiblity of seeing a werewolf; the head movements could possibly be more erratic, for example.

Mechanic

He doesn’t necessarily have to be doing anything different in terms of his acting, but there could be more visual clues that he is a mechanic, for example by having a car jack next to him or altering his outfit slightly.

Guy

He could be more scared. At the moment he feels quite confident by the end of the second shot. Just spend 20 to 30 minutes roughing in some very quick nervous poses for the “What?!” section and bring it to Q&A on Wednesday.

Overall

Animation-wise, the shot is looking great. There are already some nice poses, good spacing, arcs and overlapping action. What the shot needs now is having the acting choices nailed down and clear for the audience so that we can move onto the polishing and facial animation.

B+

As I said in my notes yesterday, I’m pretty happy with the girl’s animation and I may not have explained her emotions too well in my comments yesterday. I think the fact that she’s cautiously excited is quite nice, it was certainly what I was going for, so I won’t be making too many changes there.

I’m still tempted to make a few changes to the mechanic in Shot 1, so that he’s working on the car a little more pro-actively. If I have time I may look at changing the outfit (dungarees?) and perhaps adding some tools/equipment.

The guy is the tough one! As Mario suggested, I will very quickly try to block in some new poses for him in Shot 2 (and 3) and see what I come up with (although I doubt I can do it in the suggested 20 to 30 minutes!). Thinking about it, I should probably look back to work I’ve already done for inspiration.

In other news, Florence is very nice, even if it has rained nearly every day since I’ve been here. Having limited access to the internet (Marie has one of those mobile internet dongle things) is really annoying but it’s probably good for my productivity.

As I discussed with Mario at the Q&A this week, I tried to “super-block” my entire animation, rather than splining just one or two shots as I like to try and keep everything up to a similar level. The main issues for me this week were addressing some of the acting choices and issues surrounding characterisation, rather than the super-blocking itself:

So, is it reading OK? Some people that have watched it suggested that perhaps the guy should remain scared until Shot 4 when he gets confused by the mechanic’s weird conversation. I can’t decide. If I change it, it would mean some significant alterations to the animation, which scares me quite a lot. Here are my thoughts on the shot in general:

• Girl: Generally happy with how her character is conveyed, although obviously let me know if you think differently or if there are any body mechanics issues to address.
• Guy: This one has been the real tough cookie! As I said above, a couple of people I’ve shown this too haven’t really liked his acting choices and find it difficult to work out what he’s feeling at any one time. What do you think?
• Mechanic: Overall, I’m pretty happy with this guy. If I have time, I think I might to change the opening shot so that he’s actually working on the wheel/tyre, rather than just scratching his head; perhaps it would be a little more interesting? Is it worth changing it at this stage, given how much work there is left to do?

How do you like the new end pose for the mechanic? I liked the idea of significantly changing his pose when he says “I thought you wanted to?” and I tried some quite dramatic changes, but none of them felt very good in terms of fitting with the dialogue. I quite like the way in the current version, he retains his ‘stupidity’ but the pose is reasonably different from his standard stance.

As I said, it’s been a really tough week and I’ve been having LOTS of problems trying to come up with interesting ideas, acting choices and poses – it’s been a source of great frustration and stress!

I’ll hopefully be back tomorrow with Mario’s critique notes…

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!

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:

Thanks to Karl for the suggestion to raise Stewie up at the end to really emphasise the exhaustive collapse. Great idea!

And here’s the first run at splining the shot:

As I wasn’t happy with the end of my blocking last week (c3w2), I went away and shot some additional video reference to get a better idea of what happens after bashing through the door. Here it is along with new blocking pass stuck on the end:

The speed is much better, there’s a sense of urgency in the run and the door bash and stumble have been improved.

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!