The final assignment for theme 1 and theme 2 preproduction shares the same week. While putting on the final touches for theme 1 I was getting ready for theme 2. Once again I was in front of a camera acting out the shots I will use. While I do feel a bit awkward doing these extreme gestures on film it comes in very handy later. Note the pads on the ground! The character in the shot takes a fall. Since I am using my reference to call upon it means I needed to really take the fall. I had my wife throw wadded up news papers at my face to represent the ball. Several falls and wadded newspaper to the face later I think you could actually read the copy on my face. You could say I was "read in the face" *bud dum chshshshs!*. But I digress...

Just as I did for theme 1 I sketched out the key poses from the reference video that I will use to set up my rough animation.

Below is a shot taken from the rough animation posed using the the sketches above. This week instead of animating in stepped mode I was in clamped. This allowed me to see real time movement instead for just the key poses. I worked in this mode to avoid the gimbal lock that I had to deal with in the last assignment. In stepped you don't see that you have it until you switch to a real time mode. By then it can take a bit of time to correct. In real time you can see if it happens as your creating it and action early.
So far so good!