Back in action, AM class 2

So, we're back at it again at Animation Mentor and aleady about 1/3 of the way through the semester already. My new mentor is Dimos Vrysellas, a super talented and friendly guy who has worked for Dreamworks, Reel FX, Nelvana, and many other studios.

I have really taken a liking to his workflow for animating a shot, which is a blend of traditional and CG methods. Basically, this method stresses the blocking phase of animation by putting all your overlap, arcs, paths, etc. before moving into the graph editor. By doing this, we get to spend more time posing out the character or 'drawing poses' rather than working with spline curves, which is not very stimulating.

Here is a rough pass on my first shot of class 2, the shot called for 'Ballie' to jump over a gap. My goal for this shot was to improve my workflow and focus on the physicality of the jump.

While shooting reference for this I had the idea for Ballies 'story', he's a secret agent infiltrating an enemy position, so that is the idea behind the acting. As for my next shot, we have many options to choose from including Parkour, which looks super fun but I'm saving that for later, I chose to animate a simple dance move. There probably is no need to explain because this image will sum it up:

to be continued...