Alrighty then! That was quite a sprint to the finish line. If it weren’t for the really poor planning on my part, all of my assignments would have been turned in on time instead of being a few days late on the LAST week of school. Sheesh!

But, alas, I received *high* marks from my mentor and a solid recommendation to move forward!

So, Elliot, thank you for your wonderful passion for animation and the wisdom you’ve imparted to me.

Here is my final Progress Reel:

my…

GOD…

I can’t believe I’m this late for this assignment. Last week came and went a little too fast with the 4-day weekend I had. I basically had to get everything done by Thursday. I left Friday for Fresno, so the deadline for the two-week project was pushed up 3 days, essentially.

I didn’t make it.

Ugh, I feel horrible. On Monday, when I came back, I found my computer was unable to boot. Sick, right? I had a deadline for an already-late assignment!

It’s Wednesday now, and I’ve been able to move my latest file over to my work, so I was able to finish the fluid-pass of the Personality Walk tonight. I still haven’t worked out my “Balance” Stu pose yet. Bah. I sketched while the Q&A went on, and I have a candidate, but I can’t pose him tonight. I’ll get it done tomorrow (along with this week’s assignment).

Oh, it’s cool. This week’s assignment is merely puting together a progress reel of the whole Class 1. Easy-peasy. I’ll have it done tomorrow night with my pose.

Goodnight for now.

These are the sketches:

This is the final Stu post:

Anyway, I’ve been having a hard time with this. I tried making a walk based on my video reference. But it came out pretty bland and not very appealing. And, it isn’t conveying the personality that I want it to. Here is the rough draft:

It sucked… a lot. So I started exaggerating some of the key poses and sort of ‘fell into’ a new idea. As I was tweaking his ‘extreme ups’, I saw that it kind of looked like a skip. So I decided to run with the idea of having him in a brisk walk with one skip toward the end. I really suck at sketching out my ideas, so I didn’t bother. I just started blocking straight ahead. Here’s the second result:

It’s better, but the timing sucks badly. I’m not really sure how to fix it without re-shooting the video reference with the new idea and recalibrating the timing. Ugh… It’s a lot of work any way you slice it.

Here is the same animation but with smoother timing on the extremes. Overall, the whole thing is shorter.

Let me just start by stating: Showing complex emotions without a face is quite difficult - especially without props to help convey the message in the scene. With that being said, here are my sketches:

#4 Translated to Stu:

I still have a quirk with the knees, but not in the forward movement. Check out frames 5-8. The knee actually moves backward for a frame. The only things I can think of to prevent that is either cheat and stretch the leg, or not have him dip down so much on the extreme down. In my reference footage, I notice that my knees bend very little when they aren’t off the ground.

My second pass. Still working out the kinks in the knees.

My first fluid pass of the walk cycle. It sucks, yes, I know.