Four Emos

At 9:15 this morning I returned to the reception counter at my mom's doctor's office because of the sign that said, Please inform the receptionist if you have been waiting for you doctor longer than 10 minutes. The receptionist informed me my mom's appointment was actually supposed to be at 3pm, not 9am...and she appologized for not telling me when I checked in. Grr. The doctor was in meetings this morning so they couldn't just fit us in, and the next available appointment would be 1 or 2 months out. WTF? 2 months out?? So after waiting there for a useless 30-minutes, I helped my poor mom back to the car and we will have to try again later today. Grr.

It woldn't be so bad except I had about 40 minutes of sleep since the morning before. I was up until early this morning doing AnimationMentor homework. Then my mom was having one of those bizarre, as-yet-undiagnosed attacks, so I gave her some meds and had to watch her status for about an hour. By then it was 6am. I was stressed and couldn't sleep so I played DRIV3R on PS2 for about thirty minutes. That made me hungry so I made myself some Eggos(R) and then tried to get a few minutes of sleep before leaving for my mom's appointment at the incorrect time. Grr.

This week's assignment at AM, which we started last week, is to block out the timing of our short scene showing Stewie (the model we're given) going through four emotions; relaxed, alert, engaged and our choice of either disgusted or dejected. Since I'm always making up words and abbreviating them, I call 'em four emos (EEmohz). I had been inspired by two great new videos on AM, a shot walkthru by Jason Ryan, and last week's video lecture on force by Wayne Gilbert, so I had plenty of motivation for this assignment. I shot some reference, then sat on the idea for a day or two. Last night I went thru my reference footage and drew planning thumbnails, studying how Stewie will move to get from each pose the the next, each feeling. I'm spending time thinking about the thought process he would go thru as well, and how to animate that. It should look like he's experiencing those thoughts that correspond to the four feelings in the scene, not just indicating them. Wednesday I will start adding in the many key poses that happen between each emo and hopefully get something decent to turn in come Sunday.