LumberJack

Hello, so my second assignment for workshop 4 has come and gone and I must say I'm pretty pleased with this one.  The objective was for a push/pull, heavy lift animation.  I've seen many animations that simply have someone pick up a heavy box and struggle and stumble around a bit, they drop the object, it breaks, yada yada yada.  I thought that was rather boring and cliche so I tried to work a little bit more creativity into my piece.

I decided upon the idea of having a lumberjack attempting to chop down a tree, and having the axe blade get stuck in the tree so that he would not be able to pull out the axe.  In this way I could incorporate several different "heavy" ideas and create a little more comedy than I figured I would get from just an ordinary heavy lift.  I went out and shot some reference and was pretty happy with my results. I took around 8 takes, and then edited the best pieces together.

Now the reference had a few issues here and there that I would have to work around once I got into the computer.  To begin with, no one really likes it when you take an actual axe to their tree unless you really want it taken down (they didn't).  So I had to do my best to fake the impact.  Additionally, I do not actually own an axe, I do own a large gardening hoe, but that actually was quite light.  And because I could not actually get an axe stuck in a tree, my finally comedic moment of the fall was a little forced.

These issues however were not too big of a problem.  I preplanned much better than I have on previous animations and considered these issues early on.  Once I had my blocking in place I was feeling pretty good, but I decided to slow down further than I usually do and instead finessed my blocking adding only a few extra keyframes where absolutely necessary.  

Slowing down certainly paid off.  My instructor Manuel really wanted me to speed up my animation all throughout - the fact that my acting was forced actually slowed down how the action would have really taken place.  As well, he wanted me to really emphasis the weight of the axe.  This primarily was done by having a drag to the axe along the ground as opposed to a straight carry and by accentuating the degree to which he would lean back while pulling at the axe whilst it was stuck.

The fall back also changed dramatically from the reference into a jump with a nice hard impact.  I really liked the change made here as I felt that it really added further to the comedic effect that I was looking for.

My main issues were in the IK/FK switching (as usual) though this time I felt I accomplished it a lot better.  I didn't have a very good prop rig for the axe, though I now have figured out how to better rig props for two handed control.  This led to some awkward movement when he looks up the tree and leans back on the axe handle for support.  While I think I got it taken care of in the end, I still believe that this is the weakest part of this particular animation.  

In hindsight, I would have liked to have changed how he walks in, rather than dragging the axe behind him, I feel I maybe should have had him carry the axe over his shoulder, in this way I could have avoided the switching issues as well as creating a more dynamic looking pose.