So the last shot of class 2 has been finaled, which means I'm now pretty much done with Class 2. One more goodbye Q&A with my awesome mentor Martin Hopkins, and a progress reel and I'm done!......for 2 days until class 3.
Anyways, it's been about 6 months since I've started AM and I've come a long way. I figured that I would sit down and give myself a self-assessment on my skills and what I think my current weaknesses and skills are.
Overall, I think I'm doing pretty well. Not to sound braggy, but my work tends to feel better than most of my class. But maybe that's just me. I can achieve a pretty high level of polish with my shots pretty easily, although I'm not sure if thats not smoothness more than polish. But my arcs are pretty good, my spacing feels nice, and I have pretty good weight. I think I have a pretty good understanding of mechanics so far, but I took a look at next quarter's syllabus and it looks like we're going to learn a lot of stuff I think we need. I seemed to overcome the spine and arm additions semi-quickly. They were both very daunting at first, pretty much doubling and tripling the amount of controls....but like someone said in the lecture today, think about it in poses instead of controls, and you don't worry about it as much.
But from what I have, I'm lacking even more. So far I've been pretty much working straight ahead on 2s or 4s depending on the action. I picked pretty action oriented shots so it was more appropriate anyways. Which is another one of my weaknesses. Where other students had stories or little jokes in their assignments, mine were just straight forward mechanics. It's not really a problem right now, because it's much easier to learn the mechanics first, and then learn to bend the rules to your will. Next class we have the option of making all 3 of our assignments of the same theme, or continuous shots so I think I might do that. It would give me a chance to really develop a character's movement style and make it a bit more personal.
Instead of doing the straight ahead blocking, I think I want to try moving into a pose to pose. I'll design my shots more to have it be appropriate for blocking, and should make it easier to get a more snappy and organic cartoon feel. The splines should be easier to manage as well, and being able to have editability, and overlap easily added in. I also need to add a bit of acting into the shots, even though we haven't gotten there yet.
There's also much more that I can't think of right now. I'm going to leave you with the final shot of class 3 (when I get around to uploading it on my other computer).
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