Break between class 1 and class 2

Ok, so officially I finished the first class in Animation Mentor! I can go to the second one in June so I have to practice my skills during the next three months. I created a plan and I post it here (maybe it will be helpful for someone?). I will show my progress on this blog once a week or two.

Animation Mentor class 1,5 :)

Assignments:

1. Ball - obstacle course 28.03 - 10.04
2. 3 balls - obstacle course (balls with different weights) 11.04 - 24.04
3. Pendulum - advanced level 25.04 - 08.05
4. Squirrel (with orange squirrel rig) 09.05 - 22.05
5. Personality walk 1, 23.05 - 05.06
6. Personality walk 2, 06.06 - 19.06

Poses:

1. Anger, rage
2. Surprise
3. Moved, touched
4. Weakness
5. Gratitude
6. Relief
7. Thoughtfulness
8. Curiosity
9. Self-confidence
10. Shyness
11. Tiredness
12. Relax
     

I'm going to watch a lot of webinars from AM Student Services and read at least two or three books from Recommended Reading List.

Class 2 starts on June 27

Class I, week 12

Today is the last day of class I. The time has passed so quickly! I learned a lot of new things and I feel so happy that I'm a part of Animation Mentor community :)

My first progress reel:

Animation Mentor Progress Reel Class 1 2016 from Weronika Roksz on Vimeo.

Unfortunately, I can't go to the second class now, but I want to come back in June. So  I have three months to practice everything what I've learned so far! I have a lot of ideas what I can animate and I will post my plan, maybe it will be useful for someone :) 

Class I, week 11

In this week I recorded a new video reference. I wanted to know how exactly looks walk with skips.


My final animation of Personality Walk:



This week's posing theme: Balance

Class I, week 10

It's time for the most interesting task in class 1 - Personality Walk! :)
We had to create a character with personality and mood - I chose a young happy girl. Then I recorded reference video:


And made planning:

With those references I animated first stage of this walk - blocking:



My mentor said that I can try to make "skip cycle" - it would be happier and snappier :) This version I'll show you in the next post.

This week's poses (theme: Exhaustion)

Class I, week 09

This week we polished our vanilla walk so this is my final animation:



And "concern" pose:

Class I, week 08

This week we started to study human walks. It's amazing that each person has his own unique way of walking!  And after analyzing someone's walk we can say if he is healthy or sick, young or old, happy or sad etc. But for now we had to learn how to animate "standard" vanilla walk.

In week 8 we had to make only blocking of our animation:


And for posing - this time the theme was "Strength":

Class I, week 06 and 07

This week assignment was very funny! Our task was to animate the ball with tail - Tailor. We had to use squash & stretch, anticipation, follow through and overlapping action. Enjoyable and challenging!

At the beginning it was difficult to understand the movement of  the tail, but our mentor said that it's similar to the ribbon dance. That helped me a lot!

We had two weeks for this animation - the first one we animated our "squirrels" (mostly with "straight ahead" method) and the second one we polished the splines in graph editor.
So this is my animation after all critiques:



PS Scrat is the best inspiration! :)