Critique Day: Bean Bag

I have been the busiest I've ever been and I only keep getting busier. I barely have time right now to post this as I have to study for 2 tests and still go to bed at a decent time before waking up for my 8am tomorrow. Ugh!

Anyway, I really wish I had had time to blog about this one during the process. Alas I did not because- well- I'd been working on it.

I had to redo this one SO MANY TIMES. I had to scrap the whole thing and then parts of it over and over and over again. That's just how it goes. But it does make me miss work on the computer.

Fortunately, by stealing my roommate's light board and rigging up my web cam, I was able to save some time by working in my room.

My scenario for this little guy was that he was having a bad day at work and he's waiting at the bus stop on his way home. He's sad because nothing was going right today. Then, he looks over and spots a lucky penny. He gets excited and walks towards it, but falls on his face and doesn't get the penny.

As for the animation itself, the critique went a lot better than the flag. I need to bring the character up into the frame and make him bigger so he fits more. The waddle is too wide and "breaks character" so I would need to scale that down. Also, my professor suggested that I have him try to reach for the penny, rather than have him fall on his face. Fair enough as absolutely EVERYONE in the class had the bean bag fall over in some matter. I even predicted that everyone would do the very same thing. Because I feel like it's just automatic reasoning that for this character, you just think "oh! I'll have him fall over." It's unoriginal, I know, but there isn't much you can do when you can't give the character any real arms or legs. Falling over seems like a great way to show off the dimension and weight. The squash and weight shifting was something else I needed to work on.

Overall, people were running into the same issues. It was questionable how we all know what we're doing wrong and yet still do it wrong.

I really want to resubmit this one and fix the things I need to, but with the way things have been as of late, I don't know if that'll happen.

At the same time this week, I'd pushed off a 3D design project to the last minute. Literally. Something that I have never done before in all my years of schooling. I uploaded my assignment about 15 minutes before it was due. I was not expecting to have to redo that animation so many times and I was, of course, putting the animation before any other assignment.

I really want to work hard this week to not put myself into that position again. Or ever again. I really hate the scrambling at the last minute. I'm anxious with normal everyday things, having something to actually be anxious about doesn't help anyone.