AN03 - Advanced Body Mechanics - Assignment 02 - A Tale of Karma and Tragic Irony
The most important thing I learned from the first project was that I need to scale back my ambition AND stick to “naturalistic movements”. The point of this course is to understand how human shaped characters move in the world in an animated way.
I tried to do too much with that first project so to keep things simple I created a tale of karma and tragic irony…
Project Narrative
A tale of karma and tragic irony unfolds as Stewart walks down the street engrossed in his phone. While updating his lunch status on Twitter, a truck almost hits him and he jumps dramatically, juggling his phone and then expresses his displeasure with the driver. He goes immediately back to his phone but sadly he doesn't see the open manhole and tragedy (or comedy) ensues.
Reference was fun to do for this project… I have these feelings bottled up inside me on EVERY bike ride and getting to act them out was cathartic LOL…
Blocking went pretty smoothly… There were subtleties to the flipping off movement that were interesting to capture in the poses…
Strangely, even though this blocking pass looks really smooth, the auto splines were extremely jerky with lots of awkward pauses and bumps…
The first spline pass too much longer than I anticipated… I discovered that what looks good in poses doesn’t always translate to smooth motion and I had to re work a lot of the key poses because things like the hips and shoulders were fighting with each other. I couldn’t see this in the blocking pass but Splining lays bare all the faults LOL…
During my feedback session for this spline pass the mentor had the great idea of building in a pause after he catches the phone… this gave a lot more intensity to the animation and made the flipping off of the truck much more impactful.
After a bunch of tweaks each week until the very end of the term we finally got to this result…
Here’s the big steps side by side…
Because I was able to get this shot put together quickly enough I decided to use the rest of the term to create a 3rd shot coming up next!
