[ p l a c i d c h a o s / A M ]

The lesson this week was an introduction on creating walks. Everything from poses(contact, breakdown, extreme up, extreme down), timing, common mistakes, and tips and tricks were covered.

Our assignment was to download yet another new character, Ballie, the famous ball with legs, and animate two cycles of him doing a vanilla walk from a side view. A "vanilla" walk is basically a way of saying a generic walk, devoid of personality or emotion. Along with the walk, we were also to create a pose of Stu that best communicated that he was strong, even though in real life Stu is weak and cowardly. It's true. Once in gym class he broke one of his little stick legs playing kickball. What a wimp.

Here is the vanilla walk blocking pass. Click the image to view Ballie's first steps!

Here are my strong poses

There was a discussion on the AM forum about how to show strength in a character with such skinny limbs without relying on props. My view was that true strength was not so much a physical thing, which could be portrayed by cliche muscle poses, but rather complete and total self-confidence. I posed Stu in three poses, the left one based off Frank Zane (a famous bodybuilder), the center one loosely based on Superman (the poster-child of self confidence), and the right one from a photo of the Govenator during his bodybuilding prime. Even without the planned staging, the middle pose is easily the "strongest." Pun certainly intended...