Class 4- Shot #1

Right now I am in week 6 of class 4 at Animation Mentor, so about halfway through. This class is called Introduction to Acting and I have Dreamworks animator Marek Kochout as my mentor. As well as working on a lot of more recent stuff, he's also worked on A Goofy Movie, Darkwing Duck, and Goof Troop so I was really excited about taking him as a mentor.
Our first assignment was a pantomime acting shot. We needed to show a change in emotions in a maximum of 8 seconds using a rig with no real facial expressions. I found it really difficult trying to tell a story and convey different emotions in 8 seconds. As always, we start out by shooting reference of ourselves acting out the scene. This is my reference after I received notes from my mentor and I had to reshoot the ending.

This was the blocking phase of my animation. We just find main poses from our reference and put it in stepped mode so we can get an idea of rough timing.

I didn't think I had enough time to do anything else at the end so I just had these two basic poses for the ending, and my mentor wanted me to do more. I was able to shorten other parts of the shot to get myself more time to show her acting more frantic at the end. I still have to do some more fixing and polishing, but here's how the shot turned out.