Strength Blocking

This week, our assignment was to take our planning, and block it out in our shot. My mentor told me to do a different idea, because flags aren't really that heavy. So instead, I took the same idea, and applied it to the carnival game, where you can test your strength. I am using Stan, who is this big ole guy, and he's pretty hard to work with, because his proportions are so crazy. I can't really get his arms over his head very much. I also later on, want to add a ball that goes up when he hits the pad, and it's not going to go very far at all, to give it a little humor. But this is what I have so far!

Final Walk!

We had to finish up our sloan walk this week based on our critiques. Below is my video for what I submitted.

We also had to do planning for our next assignment. For our next project, it's going to take up the entire rest of the semester. We got a list of things to chose from that we could animate. I chose to do lifting a heavy object. I had an idea for a story, and wanted to apply my heavy object to that. My story goes, Stan is climbing up a mountain, makes it to the top, and claims it with a really big and heavy flag. I planned it all out using an animatic in photoshop, and you can see what I did for it below. I can't wait to start blocking out this guy!

Palm Oil Action Team

So I just recently got an email from someone on Etsy who is a member of the Palm Oil Action Team, asking if I wanted to donate my mini rhino painting. I have never even heard of the Palm Oil problem that's been going on. Apparently, people are chopping down the rainforest to plant farms of palm trees. Palm oil is a type of edible vegetable oil that is derived from the palm fruit, grown on the African oil palm tree. According to the World Wildlife Fund, an area the equivalent size of 300 football fields of rainforest is cleared each hour to make way for palm oil production. This large-scale deforestation is pushing many species to extinction, and findings show that if nothing changes species like the orangutan could become extinct in the wild within the next 5-10 years, and Sumatran tigers less than 3 years. Over 90% of orangutan habitat has been destroyed in the last 20 years, and over 50,000 orangutans have already died as a result of deforestation due to palm oil in the last two decades. 

The woman who wrote me, is the founder of the Boston Branch of the Palm Oil Action Team. They are paired with the Rainforest Action Network, and they are hosting a palm oil awareness day to educate people. It's going to be a big event, and they wanted to work with me to have my painting as one of the prizes for the wheel of fortune. The Sumatran Rhinos are being driven out to extinction because of this problem, and the mini painting I am donating is my rhino I made.

It's very eye opening to learn about different problems that are happening in other countries, that most people are completely unaware of.  To learn more about the palm oil problem, you can view this website here-  

http://www.saynotopalmoil.com/Whats_the_issue.php

Dog walk splined!

I got my dog walked splined out for this week! Splined is an animation term for smoothed out. So now all of his poses are flowing and continuous. This is how he turned out.

This week we also have our last poses forever. I'm secretly kind of excited that we don't have to do poses again, so I can just focus on getting my animations down. We had to show dogs playing. It was a little tough getting the right movement in there, a lot of playing poses were pretty generic and either running or jumping to each other. These are my sketches for the pose.

I decided to go with a tug of war idea between 2 dogs. I haven't seen much online in terms of dogs playing with each other, using toys. I really liked the humor behind the one that I circled however, I couldn't get the character to scale down into the puppy sized dog. So I ended up turning in what I have below. This also shows more of a weight shift in the dog to the left.

I got Sloan made into a puppy! Here's my rendered result based on my mentors critique.

Dog Blocking

This past week, we had to create a blocking pass of our dog walk. It was pretty fun, a lot more fun to me than working on Stella walking. This is what I turned in for my blocking. 

I got a lot of great feedback. I was told to take out all of the personality of the stopping and head turn though, and keep it as a vanilla cycle. So it's going to look a lot different once I spline it out. We also had to do 2 more poses of Sloan showing movement. These are my sketches for it. I was trying to go with something different, like a lot of climbing and jumping down off of things. 

and here are the circled poses that I submitted

My rendered result changed up a lot. I wanted the one to look like he's starting to step down from the chair, but it really didn't come across as what I had intended. I ended up having him climbing down the stairs, so it's more apparent what he's doing, and the he's actually in motion.