11 Second Club Progress

Some people have asked me to see my process work. I tried my best to keep track of my process on this shot,

Usually when I start a shot I will make a list of ideas and concept that might work well for the chosen dialogue. Once I have come up with my concept and characters start freely brainstorming poses and thumbnails. I do some initial thumbnails before I shoot reference to really get the creative juices flowing. I also come up with internal dialogue and any other thought processes the characters might have. Once I have some ideas I then get up and shoot some reference. I will start off by improving the scene a few times to see if I come up with any happy accidents. Then I do some intentional acting. his is were I am trying to act out the poses and ideas I came up with in my initial thumbnails. I then sit down and watch the reference , make some notes and then start doing some finalized thumbnails and ideas.


Once I fully understand what I want to do in the shot I start blocking out my scene. I typically work in stepped and stay in stepped till it is all on twos or fours. I start of by blocking the main story poses. I try to really quickly get the try to read in as few poses as possible. I then i keep breaking things down until I ma happy with it. I then shift it over to linear where I shift my keys around till i getting looking as good as possible by just messing with the timing.

Finally I grin and bear and spline my animation and keep messing with curves till I run out of time.

So enough with the chit chat.

Here are some of thumbnails that I did over the course of working on the shot. It is everything from initial ideas to how I wanted to pose out the mouth. This is only about a third of them.








Here are some videos of the animation in progress
These are thumbnails that I plugged into monkey jam to test out some timing stuff

Thumbnails for July 11 Second Club from smcwhinnie on Vimeo.

Here are some variations I had on my blocking pass








Then Someone on the forums suggested that I have an opening shot to show what the elf was looking at. I didn't think it was necessary, but I always like to give things a shot because you never know it could be brilliant.




More progress




More progress




2nd pass Splinning




Here is an alternate version I was working with




Here is the final version
Still needs a lot of work, but don't they always