Climbing over a wall

Hey! I realized that I am such a bad blogger, since my last entry was well over two months ago!! On my defense I can say that last term was mental!! First my in-laws payed us a two weeks visit, then the Olympic fever spread all over the UK and the world, and last but not least, the summer arrived in the UK. It was so difficult to focus on work while it was sunny outside... I'm actually surprised that I survived the term!

Besides all the distractions I think I managed to do a good job. Mostly thanks to my mentor Mike, who gave me great advice as to how to tackle the animations. I'm going to illustrate his advice with my last animation of the term.

Climbing over a wall

• Reference & sketches
  Since I'm no the the athletic kind of person, I decided to go on-line and find a reference video for my animation. I used the following obstacle course video (14:00 to 20:00). Then, I started my sketches. Without having to go into too much details, I drew the line of action of the character, as well as the orientation of the hips and shoulders. That will be incredible helpful in the following steps.

• Blocking
  At this stage, I moved from the pen and paper to the computer. The idea is to recreate the poses that I drew with the character. The poses were supposed to be super exaggerated, cause it's so much easier to tune it down a bit that to keep pushing fwd a pose over time. Also, it's ideal to only have between 8 - 12 poses, and the way you select them is by recreating just story telling movements.

•  Blocking Plus
  At this stage the in-betweens keys are added, before doing it so it's super important to have the previous poses checked. They must be super clear, otherwise the in-between keys will be using a weak pose for reference. A good tool to use while doing the in-betweens is a plugged called tween machine  which, takes two keys and generates a new one in between the two of them. Although it's very helpful, it also doesn't know anything about arcs, so make sure you are checking them every time you use it. At this stage, timing is incorporated.

• Refining
  At this stage things, like anticipation, breakdowns, arcs and overall timing and spacing is incorporated into the animation. It's a good idea to keep the animation on linear even at this stage. As it is possible to make small or big changes without risking overlapping of the keys.
• Final
  The keys are changed from linear to tangent and if all the previous steps were done properly it shouldn't take long to fix little details on the graph editor.

You can see all this stages of animation on the following video.