Class 2 Week 3 - Progress

This week is going to be about moving from blocked into linear or spline mode. We had to get our shot from last week into blocking plus. So this means no stepped mode and setting up the timing, spacing, overlaps and so on.

After I was quite sure that I've set all breakdowns and In-betweens I needed I selected all helpers in my scene and switched into linear. After making the first playblast I was kind of shocked about the result but who isn't? ;)

So I started to clean every curve very roughly to get the basic feeling of the animation as it was shown in the blocking. After this step the fun part began. Breaking up the movements so they wont hit every key pose on the same frame. Also getting rid of the even spacing in the movements. The next step was to concentrate on the arcs of every body part. I tried to make sure that everything wasn’t moving in a straight line. After a lot of hours tweaking the curves and going back and forth on some parts I started to tweak the knee pops and adjusted the stretch on the legs as needed. 

An with a lot of feedback and great comments of my AM fellers the animation looks now like this

I hope to get some more comments during the weekend to change the last things here and there for now. So I hope you like the animation. Thanks for reading and see you soon :)

New Class, New Mentor, New assignments

So quite a long time I haven't posted anything because there was noting to post.
The new Class started last week and had our first Q&A with our new Mentor Anthea Kerou.
She worked on some great movies like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Planet 51, Bolt and is working right now on Transformers 3. Here you can check her awesome demo reel

The first assignment for the new class was to get some reference video for the shot we want to animate.
I chose to do the big step with Ballie. To make things a bit more challenging I let Ballie step from a boat onto a pier. I planed out everything for a frame limit of about 120-140 frames.
After my Mentor saw my planning, she told me to add some kind of ending to the animation. For her it seemed more like an assignment ending ;)
So with the help of some classmates we figured out some possible endings for the shot. The next day I started to block out an ending with was kind of an combination of some of our ideas.
This is my current work progress.

*Update* - This is my latest progress and I call it final for this week

After today's Q&A I will know if there is going on to much or not, so stay tuned for next week when it goes into blocking plus.