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Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Blocking Stages

For some curious reason I've received numerous emails from students expressing their dissatisfaction with their clip, even going as far as stopping to work on it completely (curious because they all arrived pretty much at the same time). All of them were in the blocking to blocking+/polish stages, where the main ideas are in it, but not all the details.

If you have a clip which is very subtle, the basic blocking might look very boring to you (that happens even with action pieces btw.). Don't give up, trust your instincts. If you liked the idea at the beginning, hold on to it. It's normal that you get bored or frustrated after seeing your clip a hundred times. Work on a 2nd clip to change your ideas and to keep a fresh eye.

Sometimes the "wow" factor lies within the polish. Just make sure that the foundation, the blocking, is in place and go from there.

Justin Barrett has an interesting breakdown of his Puss in Boots clip, from acting reference to final polish. There is even a clip with 4 stages shown at the same time. Read through his breakdown here.

4 comments:

shiva said...

wow...thatz a great little clip with tons of info. surely helps. thank you.

Anonymous said...

It's cool to see a pro's workflow, from beginning to polish. However, I think the legs are way too still. They look odd and don't move enough.

Anonymous said...

Cool. From the first blocking to final! Yes, compared to upper body, the lower body doesn't seemed to move enough, I think.

Jean-Denis Haas said...

Glad it helps!

Since I never get around to doing a breakdown like that myself, I thought it would be good to see other people's workflow.

There is a Bluesky animator out there who has a similar page, I'm going on a hunt now.

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