class 2: what bad planning can get you into

This was my final job from class 2 at Animation mentor.

I learned a lot from this assignment, the main lesson being, "it's no bloody good to be to sloppy in your planning, stupid!"

I wanted to do a nerdy dance of some kind ( and of course Stewie would have to perish at the end of it ) - so I searched for some funny clips and found these on youtube. Nothing wrong with them per se.



Fun references, right? Just to go ahead with planning? Yeah. So I did some sketches:

Here is the problem; I cheated, I didn't do them well enough! Breakdown positions weren't there! Worse; I didn't THINK about how the dance would transition from pose to pose. And even WORSE; I didn't really think of it in blocking either.

The result of this was that I made a first pass of blocking, noted all things I hadn't prepared well enough, had to start over and redo the blocking - just to find even more stuff that i should have thought of in the very beginning.  Highly frustrating when you KNOW that you could have avoided much of this by giving the whole thing a little more time in the planning stage!

The final clip looks like this, and I am NOT pleased with it. It lacks snappiness, feels slow and has not near enough "nerdiness" in it.  Because I was lost in all sorts of "redo it"-traps through the process and forgot about the big picture.



What can I say? A good learning experience, after all. :-)