Lifting the Groceries - Part 1: Thumbnails

A friend this week said to me, "You don't go to school every day. You go to fun every day." It's true. It's nice that I am finally in a place where my imagination can soar... although soaring needs to have its limitations.

I've started embarking on an assignment where we need to show a character lifting three separate bags of groceries, each with a different weight, and to keep the entire action to within 8 seconds. Why 8 seconds? Because when working on a film, you are limited by your time and how much work you produce. If the director says, we know you can fit that action in that amount of time, you are kind of bound by it. Sounds easy, right? Well, believe it or not, animation doesn't start when you sit down at your drawing board with a ream of animation paper. There is a lot of planning that need to go into all of it, most of the time starting in your own sketchbook.

First of all, despite the fact that we could use a snowman, I decided that I would try doing a bipedal character. I decided that it needed to be simplified enough to fill the exercise, but detailed enough to get the motion down clearly. I started off by working in my sketchbook a few character designs:

Ravishing, aren't they. I decided to go with a more mannequin style in the end, covered with a skin. Next up, I had to determine what kind of poses I would need for this animation. I doodled out a few pages in my sketchbook to see how he could move:

After I got a good idea of how the little guy might bend, I drew up some storyboards of different ideas. It's still a work in process and I might change a few things in the end, but this is easier than drawing 80 full sized drawings and deciding that I don't like them:

That is it for this week. Next week it is another pose test to see if I can fit my ideas into 8 seconds. Until then.