Over the past number of months I have been working on a number of short animations exploring body mechanics. Three areas I wanted to explore was The Roll, The Swing and The Pull. This is The Pull.
With a limit of 200 frames at 24 fps, it comes to just over 8 seconds, and so to tell a story - that is something with a beginning, middle and end with goal purpose or contrast (in this shot going from free sword to stuck sword to free[ish] sword) - in such a short amount of time was quite a challenge.
 
Also this is the first time I have worked in Maya for 5 years, I currently work in 3Ds Max on a day to day basis, so jumping from one package to another was a bit of a shock to the system!
 
This piece took me four weeks of evenings (all done outside of my 9-5 work hours), each week working on a new phase of the animation as described below. I would like to thank all those who gave me great feedback, including my mentor Guido Muzzarelli.
 
The Stewie rig is courtesy of AnimationMentor.com.

So this time I decided I wanted to do something with a little more attitude, a little more acting. You can't portray much emotion in 200 frames if you have to set up the premis and have a beginning, middle and end - there just isnt enough time to hold on certain poses. So this particular idea was quite ambitious. 

 

Initially wanting a cocky swordsman to be proud of his work, then flumuxed by it, then frustrated by it. However, the time restraint made this pretty tricky, as you can see by my planning and time-remapped video reference verses the final animation. 

So I manged to get the movements I wanted in there, most of them anyway! but there was a lot of timing issues I had to work out. I was advised to revise some poses, especially during the faster movements to make the difference lesser, and so making the movement seem slower. I was also advised to shift the frames to give more time to certain movements whilst still keeping to the 200 frame limit.

I refined the timings and poses, also looking at the way the character swings the sword, trying to give the impression that it was a solid, heavy object. The timing and poses are almost there, but there needed to be more work put into certain spots that seemed to lack the same energy, or that looked to have some pixel lock - where a part of the body looks to be static to the screen as the rest of the body is moveing.

Finally I went into more detail, smothing certain movements out and adding hand movements andthe like. 

Thanks for watching, and I hope you have enjoyed my third and final piece in this series!

 

Oz