Long time no post.

Oops. I haven't quite posted in quite the while, but I must excuse myself, for I have been quite busy with all these assignments! I'll be making up for the past 2 weeks. Quite.

I'm having so much fun learning and animating, and applying concepts... Woohoo!
We're learning how to create a walk. A VANILLA (no flavor, spice, nuts, or marshmallows) walk. Just a plain ol' walk. It's important to nail the vanilla walk without adding character to it. You see, a walk can tell soooo much about your character. Age, gender, mood, limp, confidence, etc. A young animator once said "A walk is like a thumbprint, unique to each body." And that young animator was me just now. I should really quit AM and become a poet. ANYWAY.


For the walk, we started out by "blocking it" (meaning setting the key poses in time and space.) Walk block directly below: Then once you nail the blockage, you can move on and add in the rest of the frames, then go into the curve editor and try to bend them to your will. Sounds easy, but no. It takes a lot a tweaking to get a walk to look right. Most of the mentors say that their least favorite thing to do is a walk cycle. In my walk, the main problem was getting the knees not to "pop." (This seemed to be all of the students biggest problem) I had only mild success fixing them. Some students changed the leg length here and there to fix their pops, and their walks ended up looking great! I'm thinking of doing that for the revision. I would have done it this time, but one student mentioned it could be cheating. I will have to ask Bret her opinion on this in the next question and answer session this Tuesday. I don't think I'd go so far as to call it cheating. But it was a learning experience to wrestle with the knees without changing their length.
To see my first edition of the "smooth vanilla walk" please click below.

Posing Stu. I've had a couple poses due in the last couple weeks. 1. Strong. and 2. Concerned.

For the strong pose, I started out attempting to have Stu seem physically strong. For example, pulling this large, non-descript box. I scrapped that idea, and decided to attempt to portray a strong attitude, for which I came up with this:

Then on my critique, Bret gave me a few pointers on how to make this stronger yet. So I revised it and then re-turned this in:

And seeing how now I've gotten another critique back from her on the revised strong pose, I shall revise again! Yes, I shall revise again.

So! Now I'll show you my concerned pose. I had a few different poses that I was trying out. I'll show a couple:


Concerned pose #1.
I did not turn this one in.
Concerned Pose #2.
I DID turn this one in.
And she said she really liked it, but gave
me a few tips to improve it, which sounded
sort of like she was describing pose #1,
so I think I should have turned in
the first one! Oh well!

OFFTOPIC notes:

I finally got a web address of my own! My URL is "DreamWells.com" Wow.
I don't know how to do anything with it yet, but still. Wow.

I'm at work right now, and the highlight of my morning was eating fruit salad and half a blueberry bran muffin. Monday morning office breakfast platters rock! It's what I work for. That and surprise pizza Fridays.

This is long enough to bore you, so I'll sign off until next time!
P.S. I'm going to Disneyland on Saturday after Thanksgiving! I've recieved some great tips from other students regarding cool animation-related things to check out at the most magical place on earth!