Further, further tweaking. Now that the block is in spline mode, it’s a whole new game. The animation is given a brand “new life” that replaces the wonderfully lived “old life” of the blocking pass. This “new life” starts off sucking quite horribly. I mean, REALLY horrible.

The keyframes go from this: To this:

And after much, Much, MUCH wrangling of the spaghetti in that second picture, it’s resolved into this:

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Further refining the blocking pass with more sensible keyframes and breakdowns before I spline it.

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Taking in account what I learned from Michelle Meeker, I went back to the drawing board (blocking). I put in way more keys than before. A helluva lot more breakdowns to hold those long poses. It’s not as easy as it seems, because in the world of the balancing act, there are no “real holds” - only living holds that need drift in them. For example, when Ballie gets up on one foot, he’s not entirely in balance. He’s swinging his weight from up on the foot back to the other. He just does it slowly so that it looks like a balancing act. Either way, here’s the blocking-plus pass: