Class 2 - Killing Stewie by weather

After Ballie the 2-legged poor bastard had been killed by getting crushed under a falling weight, the next in turn was Stewie - this time it was the armless version of Stewie we got to work on. A good thing really, it makes you concentrate on the hips and spine and learn to do that stuff before you get distracted with hands and arms. Smart thinking, AM.  :)

In this second assignment I wanted to let Stewie die in a horrible storm. (The actual title of the assignment was "walking in heavy wind". But I of course needed some death in there too, I have my theme of "horrible, unexpected deaths" to attend to.)

So this was my first scenario:

But as I timed out the scene it got a little too long... (we had to keep it under 200 frames)  so I simplified the whole thing and let him just blow off a cliff instead. Like this:

Our mentor, Leigh Rens, said his OK and three weeks later this was the result:





With a little grass waving hard in the wind and the occasional leaf flying by the illusion will be there, I think. Maybe I'll get back to those props and environment things if I ever get back to polishing this shot later on.

Soon I'll post the third assignment of this class. It's still not completely finished so you may have to wait a week or two for it.  Cheers!

Class 2 - psychology of body mechanics.

It's been a while since I updated anything, so now I thought that I would get my ass out of the wagon (don't know if that's understandable english but in swedish it's an often used expression) and show some of the latest stuff I have been working on at animation mentor.

By now we are getting into the final weeks of class 2, "psychology of body mechanics", and in this class we have been working on three different shots, all of them paying special attention to body mechanics.
I'll make a blog note on each of my three assignements, this is the first one, the other two will be coming up shortly.

So - when you are working on one piece for three weeks you might just as well make it fun and entertaining to yourself. Which is what i did. I decided to make my three pieces add up to a little series of "horrible, unexpected deaths".

The body mechanics assignment was to make a 180 degree turn. So I videotaped myself to get reference for the body mechanics stuff and made this planning sketch.

My mentor in this class, Leigh Rens (cool guy and awesome animator BTW!), liked the setup so I went ahead with this plan and for three weeks I worked on just this little piece.

But I needed a sudden death too, to keep my theme going. Some unexpected thing was what I wanted. It ended up looking like this:




If I get back to polishing this stuff I'll put a text on the weight saying: "property of Monty Python". LOL.