Ode to Moonlighting

Well, kids - here we are. Only two more weeks left in Animation Mentor Class 1, which means if you thought the stuff done so far was hard, you ain't seen nothin' yet, baby! We're barely to the Sherpa camp on this Mount Everest climb toward Animation heaven. There are still plenty of sheer cliffs, glaciers with crevasses and puma's, and IMAX filmmakers to overcome. And let me tell ya, it's gonna be a freakin' BLAST!

This week, we embarked on a Character Walk. While I was certainly tempted to dig into the volumes of Monty Python, I decided to go with something a little more familiar. Being a child of the 80's, I grew up on such mainstays as MacGyver, The A-Team, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, and Family Ties (I really desperately wanted to be Alex P. Keaton when I was five - before I realized he was a Republican. :-) But the really good shows were the ones that came on after 9:00pm, which was, unfortunately, my bedtime. However, on a fairly regular basis, the following would happen:

(Once again, this is just the Blocking pass this week.)



Yup. That's me, sneaking out of bed to watch Moonlighting. The same thing would happen when Night Court and Cagney and Lacey aired. And more often than not, I'd have to scurry away as quickly and as quietly as possible when a parent got up to get a drink of water or something, and got caught about once a month.

I'm not completely happy with the quick-tiptoe steps yet. I kinda want to make them a bit bouncier, but I might be able to fix that this week while we refine the assignments.

I also have a revision of last week's Vanilla walk:


The big problem with this one was actually that the body was completely off-center last week. So logically, he would've fallen backwards in real life. DOH! Needless to say, I'm watching out for that now.

Also, just when you thought you had enough of Tailor:



This one has some more changes to the tail, including a longer settling at the end. And there will be more, I assure you. I started working on a new shot with tailor a few weeks ago, just for fun, that I'll finish up during our weeklong break between the end of Class 1 and the start of Class 2 in October.

This week also featured a new pose for Stu. Our emotion: Exhaustion. Which, of course, we are all familiar with now! So, here's my Exhaustion sketches for the week:
As always, click for a larger view. As you can see, I've started attempting to draw more in perspective. I'm still having a tough time with it, but I'll keep practicing. As you can probably tell, even without the circle, #4 is my favorite. That kinda Pinocchio look intrigued me. So, that's what I used for Stu:
The lighting was a helluva lot creepier in an earlier version, but I thought that it kinda detracted.

I also did a revision to the Concern pose from last week:
There's nothing more shocking than a huge sore that moves from week-to-week. ;-)

So with that, I sleep for the next twelve hours. And then we start refining, and watch our world crumble before our eyes.