Here’s the culmination of my work for class 1 at animation mentor.

It was such a great first class. I had the idea within the first few days that I would like to see a reel that had some kind of story. I was looking at all the other class 1 reels and a lot of them had such great animation but they were all restricted by the nature of the assignments. Wouldn’t it be cool to still retain this but also tell a small tale? This idea started festering and when I looked at the syllabus for the upcoming weeks, it was class 3’s assignment where we had the task of animating a heavy ball such as a cannon ball that got me thinking about cannons then about ships and finally pirates.  Everything seem to fall into place, I first came up with the ball bouncing and squash and stretch shots on the pirate ship and how they would link to each other. Then while I was waiting at a bus stop after missing a bus, it hit me I could tell a story with all the pose assignments that would set up the back story for the animation assignments.

Here was my initial planning for the class 1 reel. Here I was working out how the stories and actions and length of each assignment as well as how each would link together.

Then I moved onto doing color studies for each set so I would know what I had to model. I then started modeling everything within the first week so I could focus on animation as the term progressed.

I was going to do a drunk walk to my personality walk cycle. But with advice from my mentor I decided against it, it’s very hard to pull off a convincing drunk walk and I didn’t want to start out my reel with a subpar piece of animation.  I had planned to do more drunk poses before hand to give a reason why ballie would be drunk. (The captain is so distraught over loosing tailor he turns to the rum and then passes out exhausted). But as that was removed it gave me the opportunity to make a better exhausted poses to link up the pulling of the treasure and the stealing of tailor.

When coming into animation mentor I had thought that the basics would be both easy and not a big deal as I had done animation before. Was I ever wrong! I’ve learned more here in the past 3 months than I ever did at school concerning animation. The basics are so important. They should be learned correctly as they will apply to everything you do in animation.