Animation Mentor Class 3! Weeks 1-4

So it is now week 6 of class 3 and I'm a little behind in posting about it...But I'm going to try and make up for that by dumping all of my stuff from the first 4 weeks on here!

So first of all I have a new mentor!  His name is Rich Fournier, and he also works at Bluesky!  He knows both of my past two mentors which I find pretty amusing.  Rich is also an Animation Mentor Alumni which is pretty cool!  He has been an awesome mentor so far and I've already learned a ton from him.  I do kind of miss Pete's excessive swearing though. :)

For this class we had the option of doing an 'Anim Jam' where the 3 shots that we work on over the course of the class have a running story or common theme, or the 'Anim Exercise' option where we could just do different unrelated things for each shot.  I chose to do the 'Anim Jam' option and was originally going to do a Xena warrior princess theme, but I didn't really want to animate more than one character and it would have been pretty necessary for the ridiculous fight scenes that I had planned...  I decided to go with an Adventurer/Indiana Jones type theme instead.  I came up with basic ideas for my three shots and 'dressed' my character.

Week 1

For my first shot I was going to have the character incing along a wall, and accidentally step on a booby trapped tile on the floor.  Then spears would begin flying at him and he would dodge them.  I was going to have him trip on a spear, fall back and then quickly crabwalk back and have a spear land inches from his face.

I shot some video reference in my backyard.  I did a lot of falling down.

Then I did some quick thumbnails from my video reference.

Week 2

In my critique from week 1, Rich suggested that I go with more of the generic adventurer type character because Indiana Jones was really overdone.  I re-dressed the character, found him a new hat and gave him some leather pants.  I then did my 1st blocking pass.  I decided to get rid the the fall and crabwalk because there was enough going on in the shot.

Week 3

There was a little too much going on in my first blocking pass so Rich suggested that I get rid of some of the spears and focus on the 3 main storytelling poses.  I think that this helped a lot!

I got a lot of work done in the beginning of the week so I was able to get a bit more feedback from Rich at the end of our tuesday night Q&A.

My first 'blocking plus' pass.

And then the 2nd pass that I handed in for week 3 after getting more notes from Rich.  I also started taking it into spline mode.

Week 4

Week 4 was a lot of polishing up the shot.  I played with the timing a bit, added some eye blinks and other stuff that I can't remember because it was 2 week ago... This is the final version of the shot that I handed in.

There's still a lot of room for improvement, and I'll still probably work on polishing it up a bit more for the end of the class.  It was my very first time working with IK hands which proved to be fairly tricky.  I like how it turned out overall though!