Shots 6 and 7 Update

For Shot 6 where the Marmot steals the chicken, I was struggling to think how to begin it, as the shot is a couple of seconds long and only about half of this time is the Marmot running away, chicken in hand.

I did not want to just have him grab the chicken as this is quite boring and I do not think it would be conveyed quite well with the camera angle and closeness of the two characters. So I looked in my classical books for inspiration...

I found this image of Donald Duck in The Illusion of Life, which is shown in the section for Anticipation. I think this is perfect using the classic animation principles for my work, so I used it to build the tension before the Marmot steals the chicken from the Mongolian.

I realise the Marmot is slightly different in posing, yet this is because he would probably turn the other way round to Donald. However, the pose will be made so much better when I have added the facial expressions as I would like his eyebrows to move or him have a cheeky wink whilst held in this manner, similar to Crash Bandicoot as seen at the beginning of the video below:











I know shot 6 needs some more work especially when the Marmot grabs the chicken and for the Mongolian I want it to seem like it has more weight when he puts his arms on the ground as if to push off from them to get up, which it does not have at the moment.

Scene 7 is pretty much complete, but the way the facial shapes have been added to controller limited them somewhat, so I may just use the blend shape controllers to not raise the eyebrows as much because I think he would have a more lower angrier shape. However, they moved on their own when trying to create the mouth shapes, which means I will probably take them back a step and redo them myself (as another team member added them to the geometry).