Parkour

Parkour

The first assignment in my 3rd and final term in 3dsense. For this assignment I chose to use Kiel Figgins’s Scout Pilot as I felt that I could craft a little background story that would serve as the context of my parkour sequence with this character. The idea behind the moveset was based around a reconnaissance mission where the Scout was eventually caught snooping around and had to escape to safety. Background aside, I wanted the parkour sequence to have changes in direction and a number of jumps and at least 1 vault as a portion of this project was inspired by certain obstacles in the game show Ninja Warrior, namely the wall climb that the younger me fondly remembers as one of the major hurdles that stopped many contestants in their tracks whenever the show was on TV.

If there was an assignment that truly tested my limits in terms of my understanding of the 12 principles, this would be the one. Throughout this project I struggled immensely with spacing and ease in/outs as my animation would always get comments about how certain segments had a weird fast/slow/fast/slow feel to it which I had to dedicate a lot of time and effort to fix as best as I could in the given time we had. The cinematography of the parkour was also something that I faced some challenges in as this assignment was where I learned that camera movement also plays a part in making an animation feel natural to watch, especially with a fast moving sequence like parkour.

Overall though, I did really enjoy animating this despite all the challenges that I faced in terms of my fundamentals and I learned a lot about body mechanics and other technical skills along the way.