Class 2!! Week 1

Well after a lovely week off I have started Class 2 of Animation Mentor which is Body Mechanics. My mentor for the next 3 months is Derek Friesenborg. He's been an animator on some huge films including Frozen, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Surf's up, Spiderman 2, the Matrix sequels, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and more! I was really excited to take his class because he has animated in so many different styles.

It feels good to jump back in again after a short break, but luckily for our first week we only had a pose assignment- to sketch out people showing "movement" and pick 2 to pose out in 3D. Here are my sketches...

For movement I really wanted to do poses that were sort of off balance- like if you just saw a person doing that they'd obviously fall over- because I feel that this really shows the character is in the middle of an action. I looked up reference of a bunch of different sports and some people swinging, and I chose the two that I felt showed the best line of action and silhouette  while also being clear and interesting. Here's what I turned in..

I was really excited that Derek seemed impressed with my poses. He agreed with the two that I chose and said that he knew exactly what he was looking at when he saw them. Awesome! He gave me some notes on how to make them better. For the swing, he suggested I could get a better line of action from her upper fist all the way down to her knee by just moving the arm and shoulder up and the leg back and to the side a little. He also gave me a couple more little tweaks. Then for the speed skater he suggested that I make it look a little bit more like my 2D sketch because there were some things about it he really liked. The main things he said was the get more of the line of action in the arms from the 2D sketch and bring her torso up and back so we can see more of it. If you notice in the silhouette there's kind of just a big mass in the middle and it looks like there's legs coming out of her head. Seeing more of the torso would fix that. Here's what his sketches looked like...

And now here are my revisions...