Stu's first time...

So I took my first stab at posing Stu from my sketches of people. The assginment was to sketch from life and then pose Stu. Some of my sketches came from the Gospel Service where I play trumpet. There was a new reverend that started and decided that I wanted to recreate this slow, MLK Jr-esque preacher at the point where he was at his firiest: When he was letting us know how to save our souls.

As you can see my first attempt with Stu doesn't look that fiery. In fact I wasn't really sold on the pose at all.

The cool thing about AM is the interactivity of the site. Before posting this pose for my assignment I subjected it to the Public Review to see if someone would be able help Stu help me. Within a few hours I had five responses from some folks that aren't even in my class. All of them focused on the pose.

It was Chris that took home the secret two cookie prize. His comment that Stu's pose was very "Fred Astaire like" let me know what the problem was. Stu needs to be leaning forwarding engaging the audience not leaning back and letting you come to him. He's not selling you something and he definitely should not be dancing-yet. He should be letting you know of the dire consequences ahead of those not living right.

The idea of what I was trying to do with Stu's pose was something that I'm noticing some people seem to missing, some people=the two or three whose work I've seen. But there's a lack of getting the model into a specific character as opposed just a pose. Granted Stu has no face but the pose that he's in should be able to tell what's going on every bit as well.

We'll see it's possible I've been reading way too much Kricfalusi, and by possible I mean I've read every entry that is in his blog and have the downloaded his entire 'book' from said entries.

Ok, for the record watching another mentor critique another AM student's work is...wow. I think thePublic Review and the Mentor Critique are easily worth, the sum of money I'd rather not talk about, what I paid for tuition. Twenty minutes on about 150 frames and it easily could've been longer. So yeah. These guys do a good job. Not to mention every student can view another student's Mentor Critique.

If only Animation Mentor had been around when I was looking for schools initially. Le sigh.