Phew - another week gone by, another assignment finished! This week started with an absolutely fantastic lecture about hip motion - really really inspiring. Y'see, up until now I've generally animated hip motion by feel and gut instinct, and whilst that's fine for simple cases or for things I can easily act out myself, there have been times recently where my lack of formal animation training has caught me short. So it was great to finally have things "formalised" in my head - there were several "AH-HAH!" moments when things suddenly clicked together and started to make sense. Lovely.

Workwise, this week was a bit of a pig - firstly we had to finish our shots that we've been working on for the last few weeks. However, my critique from last week raised several issues that meant I had to do a lot of nasty invasive surgery on my curves to make it all work. That'll teach me for being such a messy animator, I guess . Here's how it turned out once it was all polished up:

On top of this (and work!), we also had to go out and film reference/draw poses for our project for the next few weeks. The main themes that interested me were "Walk in a heavy windstorm", "Parkour", and "Drunken stumble". I've decided to go for "Drunken stumble", since it has the most potential for character, and feels like more than just a physical challenge. Acting it out was a huge amount of fun - I got my best results from spinning quickly on the spot for 60 seconds, and then dizzily stumbling around like a lunatic. Not many jobs that'll let you do that for a living, no?

I'll post my planning up next week once I've got some blocking to go with it. For the meantime, it's back to the grindstone for me - alas, these characters don't key themselves. Have a good week y'all!