Sunday, January 31, 2010

Chance of Rain Dance Thumbnails

Entering my final semester of school has been pretty intense. I'm animating, or doing something related to animation, about 10 hours a day in addition to actual classes, a part-time job and an active social life. Despite my ridiculous insomnia, it's actually been a lot of fun.

For the past week, whenever I'm not studying sociology and secretly looking for Lost clues, I've been blocking in my scenes for Chance of Rain. This has insofar entailed going frame by frame through the video reference, re-acting things out for myself to answer any questions it doesn't clearly answer, and thumbnailing different ideas for poses and progressions.

Here are a few pages of thumbnails:


I've skipped the thumbnailing process before and it didn't end well, and I'm already glad I took the time to do this. Little things like realizing where the weight goes and how it moves, silhouette explorations, and identifying leading edges are so much faster to solve in a 20 second sketch versus spending hours exploring by moving controllers around in 3D.



Another thing that's really nice is that, by thumbnailing major poses and inbetweens, I've really quickly animated a movement a few times before even going into 3D, so when I do I already have a solid idea of where I'm going.

At this point I'm almost done blocking in my three dance scenes. Tomorrow's my deadline so I'm chugchugchuggin them out, but I feel good about where I'm at.

I'll do a better job of keeping this blog updated. Things are exciting right now.