Here is an update on what has been a hektic week.

The eleven second club animation has developed from a character turn around into a 2d manikin which i can animate in Flash. Each part of the character was drawn up on a separate layer in Photoshop and imported into flash on its own separate layer. I am just thankful that i have a strict naming and labelling regime else this would have been a mare.
The animation is now finished and all i have to do is stop myself from over-doing the animation on the character- ie keep going back and tweaking bits and pieces as i think this would cause an over busy character.
I have issues with the new flash CS4 interface and especially the way the tween don't work; maybe its me; but i just ended up using key frames and no tweens. Put a tween in there and the results were unpredictable at best.
I feel that my character is a bit of a comedy/scaredy cat character; the best things about him are the way his jaw moves and his shoulders and head movements are very expressive. He is looking for a response in the last second of the animation, his body language is saying "well what should i do, I've got a crushing problem here".
I have a first run of the animation with me at the moment which i will post; it has faults which i ironed most of out yesterday; these include more head and arm movement, better lip-sync on the last passage and a background (don't know if i am going to us that yet as it distracts from the character).


As for the Sketchbook work.

Well i have my sketchbook with me all the time; i have tried to commit more to single line drawings and trust my eye; this has worked sometimes; and others not. I have also been experimenting with drawing the human face more; conjouring up images in my mind and putting them down on paper. Reference work has been mainly covert; looking at people on my journy to Tremough from St Austell. This has given me the chance to observe family groups, teenage hierachies, people with animals and sole travellers. A lot of the poses have had to be sketched at speed as the subjects are rarly still.

Experimental

This is the one which has been doing my nut in. The time code that we are working to and keeping the relevence to it is the thing that is tripping me up. Today i am going to put my footage into Adobe Premiere and see what i can do with it.
We shall wait and see the outcome; but i have two different styles to play around with...

Also this week

We were invited to a talk on some vjing project that the third years are doing. They asked us for some help and maybe to do some 3D work for them. This is good; i have a meet with them today so we can try a digital enviroment i have knocked up in Maya in the virtual reality studio. This is exciting stuff...