Arrived at a Blocking Plus Work in progress I am happy about - Fearful Kid

For me, this shot has really been a true work in progress. I learned a great deal with this shot, especially with acting and performance, clarity, specificity, posing, timing/spacing, energy, phrasing, wrangling eye lines, weight, drawing. It took a lot of effort, frustration, trial and error to explore and finally uncover a performance that was genuine. As time passed, and the pandemic came, I lost a ton of motivation and artistic motivation. I almost didn’t come back to my shot, to be honest. Little by little though, i pulled myself together and came back to this shot. Things started to click more, and I could really get the animation in my head out and onto the screen to show us a scared boy, hiding, trying his best to make it out of this situation unharmed. It is a tense kind of animation that I do not normally create, and it was a refreshing and wonderful journey exploring this. I hope you enjoy the progress from initial exercise to full blow work in progress story shot, below.

Blocking Plus WIP:

Original Idea Exercise blocking:

This was an 8 hour challenge that a wonderful animator friend of mine suggested we do, recently. The goal was to animate whatever we could get done in 8 hours, under 10 seconds, no dialogue, minimal set and props, with a camera change if needed to sell the idea. Additionally, we assigned each other a random theme, so as to be a completely fresh and new idea for each of us. Then we hit the ground running, blind, having to come up with a scenario, the acting, everything. 8 hours! In the end, this is what I chose for the theme of " Boy reaches for a ball or toy". The idea came together within minutes as I did some thumbnail sketching for ideas. Once I drew a kid cowering behind a sofa, it spoke to me as something to go after. Violance and danger is not usually what I animate, so it was refreshing to try something new. Yeah, there are a good many poses I could push, and a lot of small technical mistakes, but overall I feel happy with how this came out, and I may even finish it! Learned so much on this one!