Deadline day over! After hours of lovingly moving nurbs curves around I have created an animation!

Bluezoo, a multi BAFTA award winning animation studio in central London set a small group of animation students from Bournemouth NCCA a project. The brief was to animate a cartoony scene whilst focusing on body mechanics. Both scene and camera were provided. This was such a fantastic experience, possibly one of the most fun projects I’ve had at uni so far. It was made even better by going to the studio in London and getting personal feedback. I hadn’t done much cartoony animation prior to this and I’m extremely pleased with the result. Wahoo!

Rigs provided by Joe daniels, here ya’ go: http://artofjoe.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/new-rigs.html

Really lovely rigs to use, a few issues with the stretchy limbs, but only if you push them beyond their limit. I also learnt a few things about rigging whilst analysing them. One of the intuitive things about them is that the mid-stretch controls follow the body automatically, so that when you stretch the chest for instance, the mid-spine control will stay exactly in-between the chest and pelvis. It will also rotate in order to accomodate the body deforming. This is created by using a 2 locators set-up. One parented to the chest joint, one to the pelvis and and aim constraint from the chest loc to the pelvis loc. The rotation is linked directly from the pelvis loc to the mid-control. Such an intuitive method for the animator to use and something I will definately be incorportating into all future rigs.

Mid-way through this project we got to visit the Bluezoo HQ at London! Such a fantastic experience. They were as zany as expected and all of the people were too! I jest, they were lovely. Ben Steer, who co-ordinated this masterclass gave us some absolutely fantastic feedback. You know when an animator is good when they can tell you exactly what frame is wrong and what to change. Afterwards we went to ‘Wasabi’ and I blew my head off eating wasabi sauce.