First Flipbooktest

This is my first Flipbookexperiment I did today with the Jason Ryan approach to solve an animation in 2D first before diving into Maya. This is just a quick test on one's and two's and I have no intention of building this one in Maya but I am pretty happy with the speed of this workflow. This rough animation was done in Flipbook within two hours without any videoreference. Just trying to come up with a performance. 

With a template like this in Maya, the blocking stage will hopefully be faster because the poses and the timing are mostly solved in those first two hours. Also when working this way it feels much easier to let go of poses and experiment more and come up with different acting ideas. For sure there are a lot of things wrong with this first pass, like the body needs more follow trough after he releases the ball, arm is too overlappy etc..etc.. But I think this is a good guide for rebuilding the animation in CG and refine it there. 

Normally I would create a lot of thumbnails but I could not tell from those scribbles on paper if the performance really would work. Only after I created the blocking in Maya I could see if my ideas for the shot were working. And when it did not work I had to rebuild certain parts to make it work and ended up losing a lot of valuable time. Also an extra advantage of this method is that you can train yourself much faster to solve animation problems. Within a short amount of time you can practice doing a lot of shots, experiment like crazy and train your mind and eye.

This test makes me wanna do a lot more of these. Very curious btw if directors will accept these kinda blocking test in the near future. So you already got an approval in a very early stage for your performance before you even blocked out the shot in Maya. Comments and ideas are very welcome.