Friday 16 October 2009

Hopscotch shot

I am going to try to post a little more reguarly this term than I did last term, however things have already got off to a busy start!

Had a brilliant Animation Mentor meet-up with other UK students in London last weekend, which was great fun. Good to catch up with friends I'd met before, as well as chat to some new people. We went and saw Pixar's new film Up, which I highly recommend. The visuals were stunning, and as always, a very good story with plenty of emotion. A tear may well have actually trickled out from beneath my enormous 3D glasses ... and plenty of laughs as well. Think I might have to go and see it again!
Was good to catch up with everyone and compare notes on Q&A session times, Mentors and shots, and generally talk animation without boring people!

After a day of fun, it was back to work again on my shot. We were allowed to choose from a list of things, and having never seen another hopscotch shot, and because I thought it would be fun, I decided to do that. To plan the shot, I had to film video reference, so the neighbours had the opportunity of seeing me bouncing round the garden on no less than 3 occasions! After feedback from my new mentor (Leigh Rens - seems like a great guy, and a good teacher so far) I was able to get going on blocking out my shot, which you can see in the first part of the video below. Then this week I've been working on tweaking the blocking, and then moving into spline, which is the 2nd part of the video below. As you can see, everything is now a bit floaty and swimmy and "CG" in the worst possible way, so my next job is to go in and try to pull back the snappiness that was in my blocking, and improve the weight and timing.

However, I thought you might like to see where I'm up to. I'll upload the finished shot once it's all polished up nice.

hopscotch shot progress from Sarah Knight on Vimeo.