Animation Mentor Class 3 Weeks 5-7

Well really it's weeks 4-7 because we submitted our video reference and planning sketches in week 4, but anyways...  Shot 2 of 3!  Continuing on with my Anim jam I wanted my adventurer Stewie to get over some sort of obstacle and then have a lovely surprise waiting for him in the form of a freaking huge boulder.  I found/shot some video reference of a guy doing an awesome leap/dive and roll and then of me jumping down and booking it down a sloped surface.  Through shooting/viewing this reference I learned a lot about body mechanics and also that I am really out of shape... And here it is!

While searching for video reference I found some awesome videos of people participating in the Gloucestershire Cheese Rolling Festival.  Those people are crazy.  Crazy awesome.

And then I did some planning sketches.

My boulder ended up looking more like a comet or an asteroid in the planning sketches...

For the next weeks assignment we had to do our first blocking pass of our shot.

I didn't get a change to put the boulder in this pass, but that is what he's supposed to be running away from at the end of the shot.

In my critique for my first blocking pass my mentor Rich gave me some awesome advice about having flow in your shot and contrasting quick moments with slow moments.  He also suggested that I add a stagger to help keep him moving with the build up of momentum instead of stopping him after he gets up from the roll.  He also thought that it would look better if Stewie just ran into the jump down the ledge instead of stopping and jumping down because it wasn't really all that far up.  It was also kind of hard to see what was going on because Stewie's fabulous leather pants kept blending in with the background so I changed the color.  It now looks like he's in some sort of awesome ice cave!  Also, there's a boulder!

And so my second blocking pass!

For our final week working on this shot I got to take it to Spline Town!  My favorite place!  On opposite day...  I fixed up a few things and tried to get it flowing a bit better then changed my stepped keys into splined ones.  It was a bit of a mess.  Especially in the roll after the dive and the getting up from the roll while turning.  I hadn't paid enough attention while blocking to which way I was rotating my character and so his body kept getting crazily distorted.  It took a while, but I managed to fix up the majority of the rotation problems and got it to look a lot less crappy.

My timing turned out to be a lot slower than I thought it was going to be and there are still a few things that need some fixing.  Overall though I was pretty happy with how it turned out especially because I had tried to pack so much into it.  I'm not so great with the whole 'keep it simple rule'.  :)