Aloha! So this week we had an absolutely *amazing* lecture that was essentially an hour long interview with Pete Docter (the director behind Monsters Inc. and Up). So good!! It was particularly interesting since for a lot of the interview lecture he was talking about story. This is something that a lot of animation courses tend to brush over or simply ignore ("Here, we've taught you how to keyframe, now go make a film! And remember: story is key!!"). And it didn't hurt that before I got the animation bug, I was giving some very serious thought to being a writer, so I found it doubly fascinating. Ahh, this is why I joined AM...

Now, confession time: this week's blocking-plus didn't go as smoothly as I'd have liked. The taxi and Ballie were fairly straightforward, but Stu gave me real problems. I spent a whole day wrestling with Maya trying to get what I wanted out of it and generally failing. Just as I was about to tear my last remaining hair from my head, I remembered some advice I got a few weeks ago; "In 99% of cases where splining goes wrong, it's because the blocking wasn't finished properly" (thanks Jo!). So I jumped back to my block and did my changes there, and things went much better. It means I still have to spline it out, but since it's already on 2's and 3's it should be much easier. I've still got a long way to go, but it definitely feels stronger than last week:

Hey everyone! Firstly, I'd like to offer an official apology for the week-and-a-half's silence on this blog. Real life has lately been making a concerted and coordinated effort to keep me away from AM and animating in general. Between deadlines at work, a family holiday, friends leaving for other countries and other friends making surprise visits from other countries, life has been slightly hectic... (Serving instructions for this last sentence: should be served at room temperature with an imperial crapload of understatement. Here an imperial crapload is defined as 1.761 metric craploads).

But enough of excuses! Let's catch up on all the animation goodness that we've missed lately! First is the polished drunken walk. It turned out a little rushed (particularly towards the end), and in my humble opinion could definitely still do with some fixing. But hey, it's done, and I've got plenty of other things to keep me occupied and out of mischief at the moment, so this is how it'll stay until my experiments with 36 hour days achieve fruition:

So that's that. Next, is the beginnings of our final project for class two (yeah, I know - what the heck?!). The theme for this final exercise is "fast run and quickly reverse direction". And I'm continuing my habit of putting the AM characters into the most awkward and unusual situations I can think of:

Plenty to fix, but it's a start. Have a great week everyone, any feedback to the usual address. Happy laminating!

You'll all have to forgive me for making this one slightly shorter than usual - it's been a long week, and I could really do with some sleep right now!

So last week's feedback was very good and positive, and I got the greenlight to take it further to blocking plus. Which as far as I can work out actually has more in common with splining than with blocking... but hey, if it was a perfect world, then life would be vastly more boring, no? It's still not perfect; I had lots of trouble with gimbal locking on the arms, and Maya generally being a mischief and trying her very best to wreck my lovely animation curves (the naughty minx). I've got this week to polish my shot up and make it look all purdy -  and of course start planning my third and final animation for this class... (where the hell did all that time go??).

So here it is. Have a great week!

Hey everyone! Apologies for not getting this out late on Sunday like normal; I was rather busy making a slightly unusual birthday present for my sister. Happy birthday sis!

Now, on the animation front, this week we've been starting on the motions we were planning last week ("drunken stumble" for those with short-term memory problems). We had a choice this week; we could either choose to block with Stu (the tall thin character with a massive head, but no arms this time) or a new Ballie rig with arms. At first I thought it'd be easy - Ballie looks so weird with arms, and Stu has a good spine that you can get some lovely curves out of - I thought Stu would be a shoe-in. But then I started thinking... (experienced readers will know this typically means trouble). Drunks are all about loss of balance, right? So given a choice between a spine but no arms, or arms but no spine, I decided arms would be more useful to me to help convey balance problems you typically see in a drunk.

It took me a long time to find a direction for this one - with a theme like "drunken stumble" there are so many routes you can take! I had to really step back from the "what-would-be-cool" abyss and instead approach it from a "what's-the-minimum-I-need-to-convey-this-idea" angle - after that, everything started to drop into place. And here's the result:

Have a great week everyone!