What a crazy week I guess I screwed up my back while tearing down at NAB so a few chiropractor appointments to help fix my very painful back, and Amanda got all Wisdom Teeth Removed. Nothing nearly as entertaining as the infamous David after the Dentist video, but pretty funny none the less.

I was able to act out some parts a little more and capture some more reference, so this weeks assignment was quite fun, a real chance at some acting and reacting. Because I chose the gum assignment I wanted to make sure I tried something a little different than the typical pulls away from gum until it lets go and Stewie falls, so I came up with him lifting his foot to look at the gum, which is a tough task when you have no arms to balance. Stewie will then sigh and continue to walk with one sticky foot.

I didn’t get the blocking quite to where I’d like it right now, the final walk has no indications of the sticking yet, and both the starting and final walks are lacking any character right now. Still The stumble is working pretty well so far, his checking of the foot needs some refining for sure, and the sigh timing is off but I think working pose wise.

Back from NAB it was a very fun show, slower than previous years of course with the Econmy where it is at, but the people that were there were very serious dedicated people which meant if you were talking to someone it was business it wasn’t just curiosity or passing by, or because we have some comfy chairs at our booth.

The real cool thing about this show imo was for the the first time we tried to cover a bit of the show using the MAXON3D Twitter account http://twitter.com/maxon3d. It was also nice to see a retweet from our sister product VectorWorks regarding ISD’s presentation. There were however, questions regarding where users could see video of the presentations. To be honest while we had discussed this a bit for SIGGRAPH last year and again early on for NAB, we simply had too many other things goig on with the new booth to add on a proper filming pipeline for the show.

We’ll continue to consider filming presenters for future shows but what I did try on the last day since we has such cool presenters, was to film a few of the sessions with my Panasonic LX2 which is actually a still camera. Being back home now I can see the quality just isn’t there really, particularly audio wise. I’ll look into whether I can clean up the audio enough, but I can’t promise anything.

Thanks to our good ol buddy Adam and Sebastien for some really great nights of Black Jack too. Distractions from AM assignments have never been so profitable before.

What a week to be both finishing one assignment and starting another. I wasn’t really set up to film reference while in Vegas, although one assignment option was drunken stumble, and there was plenty of that I can assure you.

Anyways, refined a lot f it, I’m still not happy with the ending, but thats what this is all about, learning right?

Crunched what I could before going to Vegas on Friday for NAB. It’s pretty rough and trying the record every 4th frame for blocking as one lesson suggests as a technique didn’t really work out well for me, I think its complicated things and made it really hard for me to focus on great poses and timing as my mind is too focused on making the 4th frame instead of thinking about it is “KEY” frames.

Hopefully I can fix it up a lot while in Vegas, but well it is Vegas and I’m a notorious gambler so I’m not setting high expectations on myself.

An overall uneventful week for me personally, I took the time to recover in the evenings which of course meant I was also procrastinating a little from assignment, I kept trying things but not being happy with what was coming out at all, but I think I finally started to figure it out. Still a lot of issues in it at this point but the nice thing is there two more weeks to refine it and I know Mike will have a lot of critiques.

QA was awesome we went over again and Mike is really good about analyzing the lecture and discussing things he likes and doesn’t like about what was said. Really makes you think and not just take the lectures as the bible but more of a good recommendation, and really find your own way.

Anyways here is the beginning of Ballie taking a very big step across a gap.