Wrap Up: Fall Semester 2024

 Starting off this Fall semester, I came into this class with three goals in mind for Senior Portfolio:

1. To create and animate clips to add to my demo year in my fourth year at Chico State
2. To push the limits of what I know in posing and body mechanics
3. Improve on the flow and timing between the movement of poses

Coming to the conclusion of the semester, I've come to realize that some degree of these goals were met. In the end, I was able to create two pieces I’m pretty satisfied with and require some extra work as these pieces still need more polishing and a nice render. Additionally, I was able to explore more on body mechanics with the martial arts one, especially with arcs and COG momentum. 

I noticed that this semester I was able to really take my time to nail down blocking poses in my dance animation, which helped me a lot with figuring out the in-betweens. With this, I spent a lot of time testing out flow and timing with kicks and transition poses in both animations. This really helped me better grasp the fundamentals with timing. 

Overall, this semester in Senior Portfolio was really productive in my improvement. Although I didn’t stick to my original play on dialogue-heavy animations. I feel like I was able to branch out more with body mechanics and some passion projects that I wouldn’t have been able to complete outside this class. In the end, I was able to complete two pieces I liked. 

 

What I want to change up a bit for the Spring semester is switching up a strict linear plan to an ‘update-as-needed’ plan with animation concepts or themes. On top of that, I want to push myself to explore more on body mechanics and try out some game cycles too.

To conclude this semester wrap-up- I feel satisfied with the work I completed this semester. Still, I have growing list of ideas that I want to animate this upcoming year and will be working on polishing up the dance a bit more over break. I’m excited to go into the New Year with a list of new ideas to work on next semester!

(Fall 2024 Demo Reel)