Honey Bunches of Awesome

So I haven't posted a lot up here for a while, mostly because I have had a CRAZY busy couple of months, but I have a ton of stuff to post up here over the next while.  The first thing that I wanted to post about is that I started Class 2 (Psychology of Body Mechanics) at Animation Mentor!!!  My new mentor for this term is Pete Paquette, who like my last mentor works at Blusky Studios.  Some of the Q&A's that we've had with Pete so far have been the most entertaining that I've had since joining AM.  He doesn't sugarcoat things and he swears like a sailor, and I kind of love it.  He has also been doing walkthroughs in Maya during the Q&A's which have been really helpful.

For our first assignment we were given a pick list to choose from including things like walking down stairs, a sidestep, river dance, back flip, and other stuff like that.  I chose to do a roundhouse kick, because I was hoping that it wouldn't be too terribly difficult so that I could focus on making the weight of my character believable.  It turned out to be a lot more difficult than I had originally thought it would be...  For the first part of the assignment we either had to create our own video reference or go and find some on the internet.  Seeing as how the assignment was not to create an animation of someone failing a roundhouse or falling over I knew that filming my own reference would probably not be the most helpful route.  Luckily I found a couple of great roundhouse reference videos on youtube and this one especially was great in describing what was going on during the kick and showing it in slow motion as well.  I don't think that I have ever watched so many people being kicked in the head...There were many videos of people being on the wrong side of a roundhouse, and not just adults, little kids too....

The next step was to take the video reference and make thumbnails of the major poses to plan out our animation.