Stretch!

Hello there, 

I thought I'd share my work In progress as I work my way through my second ianimate workshop. 
I am currently talking feature workshop 2 with Michael Kiely. Our latest assignment is to animate a character reaching to grab something and to show the movement and stretching involved in such an action.

Up to this point I have stuck very closely to my reference. I have had to shorten the timings of some of the actions as I felt they were becoming floaty as they often do if you stick to your reference too closely.

My goal with this shot now is to polish!  I will attempt to create some nice arcs of movement and finish animating the hair and add some nice secondary motion to the fingers.

I was thinking it would have been nice to have a bit more story or excitement to the shot but I guess this is something I should think about before I film reference and sit down and animate!  But hey it works OK as a demonstration of body mechanics, maybe next time. :)

WIP- Blocking out completed

Now I'm finally ready to come out of stepped keys! I think its as good as I am going to get it without turning my keys to splined. I still feel there is alot of things I would like to fix with this but I think I need to see how the timing is working to figure these problems out.

WIP - 'No fire, No energy, No nothing!'

With some time to animate this month, I have got stuck into a short acting piece with a sound clip from The Fifth Element. The rig is Morpheus from: (http://www.joshburton.com/projects/morpheus.asp)
It's one of my first attempts at animating an acting peice with full lipsync so it will be a bit of a challenge for me.

Here is my initial block out:

Deciding on acting choices is always tricky for me as I have a tendancy to change my mind later :/ Hopefully I won't chnge the poses too much from this initial block out...