Week 2: Revision

Got my first critique from Royce on monday, and I have to admit, the guy is extremely helpful. He goes into so much detail during his critiques and you really end up with an in depth knowledge of where you can improve, how to do it, and most importantly, why.  Also, he's generous with times. Most people in my class had almost 15 minutes of correction time with him, and I spent most of the day watching my classmates' critiques and I learned a ton!

Royce went through the sketches and suggested that I take poses from real life drawing and accentuate, exaggerate them--and see how far I can push certain poses. In essence, this'll let me explore different ways to make poses interesting.

As for the pose I did with the Stu character in 3D, Royce suggested I take the feeling of having the ditsy, young girl and pushing that a lot farther. I had been concentrated almost entirely on silhouette, and he explained that things don't need to be separated all the time (like the small empty space between the arms and torso that i had forced in there!) :  things can overlap and interact, as long as the silhouette is clear.  He suggested I accentuate the line of action and, to make her seem more like a young, careless girl, push the top of her body back a bit.  Instead of having her head fixed to the phone in a very cliche way, I could then tilt it the complete opposite way to enforce that feeling of "ditsy". It keeps the feeling that she's fixed to the phone, but it makes the pose so much more interesting, and readable! The arms should be kept against her body as support, because no one holds a bag, regardless of its not very head, without having some kind of hooking against the body.  I learned so much from his critique and I'm psyched to have Royce as a teacher.

and after some playing around and using Royce's input, this is what I came up with:

I think this is so much better than what I had. Hopefully you guys think so too  (Gen! ). She really feels young and princess-like. I might play around with it a bit more, but first I hafta get started on my homework for Week 3.

This week we're learning basic planning, thumb-nailing, and we have to animate a Basketball doing some basic bounces to learn about timing and spacing.