Monday at AM was our highly anticipated Star Wars Episode III Global Q&A. Close to 300 of us logged on to participate with ILM animators Delio Tramontozzi, Kevin Martel and Charles Alleneck (listed left to right as they appeared in the video chat window) and moderator Shawn Kelly. It's always great to interact directly with pro animators we admire, to get their insights and all. Delio and Charles are both mentors and though Kevin is not a mentor he appears on many of the class lecture videos we have from week to week.
Speaking of the lecture videos, this week's lecture, about advanced anticipation, featured a bunch of clips of Shawn and Kevin they'd shot of themselves for reference. Some of the shots were of them starting a run, or a jump and a few were of actions that looked like they might have been painful; Shawn fell over a low fence (intentionally, for art) and backwards off a swing (it was deliberate!), and Kevin leaped several times into some shrubbery. So I asked in the Q&A if they ever injured themselves filming reference. Delio, who was apparently the mocap stuntman for a lot of shots in Ep. 3 told us he hurt his neck while doing mocap of an all out run where he gets "shot" and falls to the ground. None of them said they had any stunt training. I had thought about injury during filming of reference from watching the lecture video and doing my own reference the other day. Sometimes the shot calls for an action you just can't safely act out for reference. For example, I would have liked to film myself tripping and falling, but I had no stunt mattress to fall on.
Last night I had a chance to animate for 3 hrs straight. It's been a long time since I've been able to spend that much time in one session. I was getting sorta what I wanted with this week's assignment and it felt good to be able to just sit and work on it without worrying about anything else. The shot still needs tons of work, but I made more progress than I've been able to make on any recent assignment. You can check it out with this link (AVI, about 1MB).
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