All right, that's quite enough sniggering at the back there. Quiet down now, quiet down you rowdy lot. Always like this on a Monday morning, isn't it... Before we begin, I have a brief service announcement. *Ahem*.

After fighting, beating, cussing and crying with Joomla for more evenings than I honestly care to recall, I finally discovered this great magical tool called "Google". It's great! You type stuff in and it tells you the truth. ALWAYS THE TRUTH. But this announcement isn't that I've gone crazy; you already knew that dear reader. No, this announcement is that I googled the RSS problem I've been having, and found the solution in a rather embarrasing 5 minutes. Apparently Joomla only RSS-feeds pages that I've marked as "front-page". Which is a little odd, but doesn't really matter - as live bookmarks are now working! So, if you feel like giving them a spin, then click that funny orange (or blue?) icon you've got in the addressbar right now - you'll add a special bookmark for this site that updates with whatever my most recent posts here are. Marvelous stuff.

Now, time for some aneemayshun! This week's assignment was a lot of fun, and I really enjoyed doing it (well, not quite as much fun as knocking Stu out last week, but frankly he had it coming). This week, we were given a new character: Tailor; a suspiciously squirrel-like creature with a ball and a tail. Those of you who've known me a long time will know I had to animate a squirrel in my second year at uni. Those of you with clear memories will remember that it didn't look very much like a squirrel either So this week was a nice chance to wipe the slate clean, lay old ghosts to rest, bury the... umm... well, you get the idea.

So:

All comments, criticisms, feedback and poo-flinging are welcome. I'm not linking to my university squirrel animation out of pure shame, but it'll suffice to say that I think this is an improvement. Finally, as a reward to you for reading this far, dear reader, I'd like to direct you to this wonderful piece of punnery by the absurdly talented Michael Schlingmann. Enjoy, and have a great week!

This week we've been learning about overlapping action, and been having oodles of fun with pendulums. They're surprisingly tricky beasts to get right, but a lot of fun and very rewarding. Suffice to say, I've burnt a lot of midnight oil this week!

So, you're wondering how to unhide or unlock hidden attributes on rigs like rotation and scaling? Well, before we begin, I should probably put my "TD-hat" on, and warn you that you should be careful when doing this. It's not dangerous or anything, but normally riggers lock their attributes precisely because they don't want their animators messing with them. You're free to unlock them, and in the context of Animation Mentor and such it's absolutely fine, but if you do it on a professional production of any sort and your riggers find out, they'll probably murder you. Anyway, warning over, let's get unlocking!

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: