I don’t think my video reference is particularly amazing. At least, if nothing else, it does at least help to convey what the heck is going (something that a few people have struggled with in the storyboard/animatic phase), but it’s lacking a bit of character at the moment. I may shoot some more or I may just try and stay wary of the fact that the acting choices need more “oompf”.

I did do a few pose sketches to see if I could come up with some appealing shapes, lines of action and add a little more ‘character’ to each of the characters:

One of the main things I wanted to address from last week was the slight confusion most people seemed to suffer from when the camera cuts up close to the mechanic, so I addressed that in an updated storyboard.

And here’s the scene layout I did as a result of that:

It’s still far from perfect, but it’s getting there. I should point out that the awful camera move did not see any finesse at all, it is completely linear. Even so, I second-guessed what Mario would say about it in my critique and I’ve already taken it out of the next iteration!

This is what Mario had to say:

Layout

Get rid of the moving camera shot. Re-frame the action by pulling the camera back a bit such that we can see everything without having to move.

Don’t worry about the establishing shots for now. Take the first shot, pull the camera back a bit and slowly truck in so that we have an establishing shot without greatly extending the animation.

Consider adding a cut that re-frames the action on the guy and the mechanic after the girl has finished her line. That will make it clear to the audience that we’re only concerned with the two characters on-screen from now on and it will reduce the amount of animation to do.

In the last shot, don’t change the camera angle; go back to the existing shot that the audience has already seen and is comfortable with.

Overall

Pull the cameras back a bit, they all feel a little close.

B

It’s been a tough week, from both a workload and motivational point of view. Video reference tends to stress me out and takes a very long time to get right (it doesn’t help that my parents are renovating their house, so I had no space to actually film anything!). Once you think you might have something you like, you need to spend bloody ages editing it and chopping it all together. On top of that we had to do additional sketches and the layout with some rough blocking poses.

Ugh. Tired.

In my critique, Mario had a few misgivings about the shot; mainly that it’s quite ambitious, there are three characters and it’s reasonably complex in terms of cuts and camera angles. Overall though, he was happy with the work I’ve produced this week, he especially like the characters/costumes I’d come up with:

A

A very busy week, but it was definitely worth it! Time to move onto blocking and video reference!

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!

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!

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!!

Now it’s time to do the final shot for the term! Luckily I managed to find some footage of a strange man caught hanging around a children’s playground!

Here are the planning sketches for the next assignment. Stewie attempts to correct his bad jump by making sure he doesn’t fall to his death!

Really pleased with how these turned out actually. For the record, they’re done with REAL pencils on REAL paper! Amazing!

Video reference compiled from various sources to describe the next sequence I’m working on:

The main actions from my new shot: the vault over some piping/AC unit and the leap across to an adjacent building:

The jump section of the animation broken down into key poses:

The last few key poses from the sequence:

Overall Theme Reference for the term:

Video Reference:

Sketchbook Planning 1:

Sketchbook Planning 2:

Stewie’s Constume (based on Faith from Mirror’s Edge):

And here is a rather unfortunate blooper that occurred during my reference shoot:

How embarrassing! :(

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!