Phew, this was quite a week! Between lots of jobs to do at work and a larger number of tasks to do for AM, it felt like Sunday would never come... Here's hoping next week will be slightly calmer!

This week we learnt about blocking and planning (which in the animation world is a bit like wiping your bum - you could skip it, but everyone would quickly disown you, and you'd really stink). We were then given four (!) tasks to do for this week:

1. Make sketches on the theme of "excitement"
2. Pick our favourite pose and take it into 3d (like last week)
3. Plan a bouncing ball using our newfound knowledge on the subject
4. Animate a bouncing ball of maximum length 100 frames

Oddly enough, it was finding excited poses that I found the most difficult of these - "being excited" is such an abstract thing to express without knowing what the person's excited about; especially if you want to avoid cliché'd poses and when don't have a face to help sell the idea.

So, here are the results in no particular order. First; the poses:

Then animating a bouncing ball (man, it felt soo good to be animating again). It ended up a bit like this:

Planning link (jpg)

Download Quicktime version (225k)

Apologies if the flash video doesn't work, I'm still wrapping my head around it and it's very possible I've done something wrong... Hope y'all like the animation anyway, have a lovely week, and feel free to send me any praise or abuse through the traditional channels