Class 204: Planning for my next animation

Hey everybody! Thanks a lot to anybody who's spending some time to read my gibberish lol.
Anyhow, this is week 5 already, and for this week we're starting our second animation planning. So for this one I wanted to animate something more dynamic than my previous work. I'm going for a small parkour sequence. Here are my reference video as well as some drawings that I've done for the planning process.

Class 204 : 180 degree turn final

We finaly handed in our first assignement this week. 4 weeks of work for less than 10 seconds of animation! I can really see the difference with what I used to do before.
Compared to a few months back, this time everything was thoroughly planned from the beginning.
Here is the final version, and I hope that you ll enjoy.
For now I'm only playblasting my animation but at the end of the term I'm planning to render my old animations and post a beautiful video full of colors.

Animation blocking and spline versions.

The first video is at the blocking stage of the animation. An animation is said to be in blocking when it only contains the main keys of the story. There's no need to add too much details, as long as you can clearly understand what's happening in your scene.
I think that I really started to understand the importance of a good blocking. Without it it's really hard to end with a good animation.

The second video is the spline version with a lot more keys added to the animation. At this stage I added more details like overlaps, ease ins/outs, solid arcs, and more breakdown keys. I think that I did a bit too much and already tried to get to the final look at this stage. The consequences were that I had too many keys all over the time frame and I couldn't recognize my main keys anymore.

I guess that managing all that mess will better with time.

Class 201 Animation planning

Before moving showing you my animation I thought that it would be a good idea to show the few drawings I did for the planning process. My drawings aren't great but I think that I can manage to express my ideas with very basic drawings.

Term 2 at Animation Mentor

We had nearly 2 weeks off at AM and I enjoyed to stay away from the computer. Last week the second term at AM started and I discovered my new mentor for the term. It's Drew Adams, currently animator at Dreamworks.
The first week started and we had our first assignment already. For this term the assignments apparently look a lot harder than those from the previous class and they're differently structured. We'll only do 3 different animations for the whole term, each animation extending into 4 weeks.
We had a pick list of different possible animations to chose from. I decided to animate a character jumping and doing a 180 degree in the air and settling.
The first week was only dedicated for the animation planning. I've been doing a lot of drawing and shooting video reference for my work. Here is the final video reference that I'll use for the animation.