I started Class 03 of AM: Advanced Body Mechanics. My mentor this term is animation master, Mike Walling, of Blue Sky (and Sony Imageworks and Dreamworks) fame. A long time ago, I found his fantastic tutorial on workflow (under the Docs! section) and learned so much from it. After having 2 Q & A sessions with him, I’m positive that I’m going to be learning exponentially this term. I’m very fortunate to have yet another super mentor. 😀

The coursework is very different this time around. Instead of having a list of options to choose from for our animations, we have to come up with it all on our own. Also, we have to decide whether the 3 animations we’re making this term will be unified under a theme (which is decided by us) or 3 separate motion tests. If you choose the theme, it will dictate how you animate. i.e. a ninja themed character will jump different than a ballerina type character. What’s most important though is that AM wants us to stress the physicality in each assignment and to avoid turning our shots into acting shots.

With that said, I decided to go with this:

[singlepic id=89 w=320 h=240 float=center]

What I love about monkeys is their agility and ability to flow through, around, and over trees. There’s this very natural rhythm as they move from branch to branch, and I wanted to attempt animating it. I also LOVED Tarzan, and how the Disney animators instilled that force, momentum, and flow in his movement. Hopefully, I won’t get sick of monkeys by the end of the term. 😉

Here’s some planning:

I have a huge tendency to over complicate my animations, so I decided this time around to keep my first assignment simple. Plus, this will help me balance my full-time job + school + life better. Our animation needed to be between 100-200 frames, and when I first blocked this out I was actually UNDER frames. A couple of my classmates pointed that I could add more pauses to the end to break up the fast paced rhythm at the beginning, so that helped me out a lot. Anyway, here’s my blocking!