Fighting in the forest

This is a personal project I did after a one year of learning animation. I wanted to celebrate me doing some progress in animation so I decided to create a shot based on my favorite game (you can try to guess it =) . It is insane that until that one year I haven't opened Maya once! Time flies so fast when you have fun.

I did only animation in this piece, all 3D models, rig, environment etc. are not my.

I always start from a reference, I believe that it is a good starting point. There is always something that you can take from reference (timing, poses, temper, thought process or even some little gestures). Looking at my reference now after a few months, I see that I would have done my animation a little bit snappier. And yes that's my favorite game League of Legends with my beloved character Katarina and her flashy plays that got deeply into my soul xD

I deviate from reference a lot that's why a lot of times I draw a few poses or some moments to better understand what part of body moves and how it moves. My drawings are awful and because of that I don't show them to anyone, furthermore it seems like I am the only one who understands what's on those pictures.

These are only a few from all I've done. But as you can see I really don't care about accuracy of drawing, the most important thing to me is lines of action, complementary lines and poses themselves. 

I prefer working through blocking pipeline that way it feels like I control my animation all the time and it helps to concentrate on poses. Plus I can do major changings if I want when I work in blocking.

This is the last version of blocking I did for this shot. Now I can easily see that it is far from been a good blocking. Poses aren't pushed enough, there are no main overshoots and offsets but at least idea is somewhere there. I had to add all these things on spline stage and that's the reason why this shot took me longer than I estimated. But yeah, after few (a lot more few) iterations I got the result that you can see above.

The last thing I would like to say is "Thank you" to all animators and even my friends (who are far far away from animation) for their honest opinion and advice. The best thing I have learned from this shot is "the less the better". That is how chaotic 10+ seconds piece changed into a solid 6 seconds animation that is now taking part in Rookie Award contest.