Whew!! What a whirlwind last couple of weeks at AnimationMentor! After reblocking the baseball swing shot, I really feel like I got a sense of what was missing (especially after hearing encouraging feedback from past mentor Arnie and Saturday mentor Sandy!). I'm very happy to say that despite the hiccup RIGHT before finishing up class 3, I proudly moved on to class 4: Intro To Acting!! This is the meat and potatoes of character animation! The actual act of ...acting! Up till now it has been all about body movement and mechanics of the body. We finally get into the internal (and eventually, external) dialogue of a character! What motivates your character from the inside that affects the action on the outside! It's only the start of week 2 in Intro To Acting, but I can already feel livened up by the prospect of being able to REALLY give the character life and thought!
First, the video is of the "polishing" of the baseball swing. Still needs tuning here and there but overall, I'm pretty happy where it turned up :) Especially since those arms were literally spiraling out of control a couple of times!
Second, my awesome new mentor is Ray Chase: this guy ...this guy is amazing and I am extremely pumped up to be learning from him! He's on YouTube so I FULLY encourage you all to check out his demo reels. I had been holding on to an idea for the first pantomime shot of Class 4 (pantomime: Express or represent (something) by extravagant and exaggerated mime) and am really juiced to finally get to try it out!! The idea is that a overly confident magician (...I always wanted to be a magician lol) comes on stage to do the "Rabbit-Out-Of-The-Hat" trick. He shows the hat to the audience and after a couple of "hocus pocus" and "alakazam"s, he reaches into the hat to find .....no rabbit! Panicking, he feels around the inside of the hat, brings it up to his face to have a look inside to see no rabbit ....looks at the audience and then runs off stage! Blocking will be coming soon!! EEEPPP SO EXCITING!
