So, this week I have mainly been:

- Enjoying an unexpected day off from work and playing around in the snow like a little 3 year-old

- Celebrating turning 24

- Trying to take over the world (the same thing we do every night, Pinky...)

- And a tiny little thing called Animation Mentor

There was a great AM meetup in London today to go and see Bolt (in 3d!!!), which was a nice relief after a rather hectic assignment. It was great to see so many new faces, and to start putting faces to names. That's the thing with studying at an online school - you're never really sure that your classmates genuinely do exist until you meet them... Yes Dan, this includes you!

So what of this week's assignments? Poses first; this week's posing theme was "devastation". Unfortunately, there's rather a lot of photo reference for this thanks to the recent events in Gaza, and many of them make for... "uncomfortable viewing", shall we say. I'm not going to get into the politics of it all, but it really brought home just how lucky I am to live in a peaceful country, and just how much strife there is out there.

And as for our animation assignment, we were given three "animation assault courses" (think bouncing-ball boot-camp), and told to pick one and take a bouncy ball through it, with as much squash-and-stretchy goodness as we could muster in 120 frames. And thus it was: