Solstice

I'm now home for the christmas holidays. Final submissions done, Animate+ uploaded, and the marks are in.
And I am pleased. I thought the marks were fair and I earned what I got. I wish the animate+ plus project had been a little more developed at this point, the teaser I uploaded is missing frames, cuts off the end, doesn't really give anyone much of an idea of what's coming (which I suppose is the point of a teaser). Also, only after effects CS4 can render it because of RAM constraints, utterly retarded and frustrating. I spent a lot of thursday evening in the studio dividing up my 30 seconds of animation between 5 computers (6 seconds each) and making sure I knew where all the frames were going and that the PCs weren't logging themselves off. I was lead out by security at 9pm with a couple of hundred frames missing, shame. It does look beasty (yet shiny) in it's full 1080p glory though, a bastard to compress for the 64mb upload limit.

I can't wait to start projects after christmas.

Crunch Time

This week felt like things really got going, I was pretty busy trying to make sure everything was going to work out and get done on time, and it was fun, and a little nerve racking. First thing was mine and Jake's presentation on the "Representation & Ideology of Society & The Class System in A Bug's Life". This was on the the Tuesday. It went fairly well I thought. We planned it carefully with slides and notes, we rehearsed it several times, and though it could've been a bit longer, it was a very dense presentation in terms of analysis and information. I'm so glad it wasnt just me out there as having the pressure shared between the two of us meant I could talk more freely and lucidly knowing I was passing the presentation back over to Jake every other point.

Then I planned to do my 3D walk based on the footage we all shot, I wanted to base it on the second walk, the walk that expressed an emotion of out choice; I chose to try and replicate joy on a summers day.
The 2D I planned to portray my ordinary walk, though its probably not how I actually walk, but how I walk when I'm in a room full of spectators, being filmed:



So the first is the ordinary walk and the 2D. I did this in a sketchy style to try and get correct proportions and convey a sense of authentic obvservation and realism. Though I'm quite pleased with the key poses, the animation loops awkwardly with that dreaded "limp" we've all been trying to avoid which an extra couple of frames could've fixed. Still, I'm quite pleased with the result, especially considering the breakneck spead I powered through at:



The 2nd walk expressing my joy on a summer's day I thought would be a fun challenge for 3D. Well...it was a challenge...
It took me hours to get an outline, then further hours to add arms movements, head movements, refinements in the graph editor. The most sublime touch though, was offsetting the bob of the hips to the steps, this meant instead of the walk sinking into each step, it appeared to rise out of it giving the legs a nice snappy spring. Though its not true to the bounce of the source footage, it conveys similar emotions:



Now I'm going to try and devote some time to The Incident. There is not chance in hell it'll be done for the 11th, so I'm going to aim for the next deadline in March.