animation...yeah

animation begins! yeeeeeeeeeahhh!

so a few problems with the rig, john cant actually be moved from the spot...no idea why this is. Could be something to do with his RPSolver IK handle...i checked all the attributes for the tick box and there all checked so i have no idea why this is happening. Since i couldnt create a pole vector for the knee though, im blaming the IK handle...

anywaaaaay

juggling....juggle juggle jug-a-ma-ling....a mastered technique to do both in real life AND animating but a biiiiiiiiig thankyou to Adrian for providing me with reference footage of him juggling...was very useful and at times...very entertaining :P

inspiration for shots:

when john looms over benny, i had in mind the sort of shot from a bugs life when the character of hopper terrorises the colony. The combination of camera angle and his drastic move really gives a sense of dominance that i wanted to reflect in johns character.

suddenly...things werent going to well and after goldylocks had left the 3 bears house...the juggling went down the pan...shite

*brrrrrrring ring....brrrring ring*

"aaaaaaaaaa low" in a deep bear like gruff

"dan...mate...its going mental here?"

"SAAAAAAMME" he said in his new zealand accent

we had to rethink AGAIN...we only now have a day and a few hours and have to do SOME form of animation. The juggling, ok, i probably could do, but i would need longer to get all the arcs, slow ins and outs working and im quite frankly out of practise ESPECIALLY with the graph editor.

we rethought and decided to both do some mini pieces of animation. Mine with benny and john where benny drops his ice cream on him and dan would be completing some piece with benny interacting with the environment...including character close ups....thats gotta add up to 30 seconds right? we shall see.

development

starting to build the scene...adding in johns reactions etc....first time ive ever animated 2 characters in the same scene...aaaaahhh

further development....small tweaks, changing of times....experimentations. I always imagined the movement of john to be quite rigid...hes old, tired, pissed off, and not exactly a bundle of joy...so i imagine his limbs would be quite stiff...its like he's trapped within his own body...so there! p.s its unfortunate that john is paralysed from the waist down....but at least he has a gd sense of balance!

adding, tweaking, pulling and pushing...dan commented that the action slows so i dragged a load of keys forward to hopefully keep up the pace....its strange aiming for sort of a rigid animation....sometimes i add more thinking it will provide more to the scene, when all it does is confuse it...

overall...im not satisfied with the animation i produced, yes theres a good quantity of it but the quality could have been so much better had i had the time to finesse the animation. Its a shame that the ending of the gag will now have to be cut off as well, but admitedly its the most underworked and id rather not have it in there rather than just for the sake of finishing. Animating with these characters had proved some positive and negative elements about the rigs which has highlighted to me where they need improving if i wish to reuse these characters again in an animation...which (lets face it) would be a bit of a waste if i didnt considering all the hard work me and grigs had put into them.

the schedule is laughable....to think we originally intended for 8 days of animating is something of a distant dream now compared to reality. We've spent far too long on the pre-production and parts of the production stage that have frankly led to the animation suffering greatly. The post production now lies bunched together displaying the end will have to be rushed in order to actually get this handed in. Im glad grigs has done all his tests though for compositing which will aid us in some way, i just hope the rendering goes smoothly and quickly as we will be relying on the farm in order to churn out those frames.