I was running out of time to animate towards the end, so I opted for a limited animation approach for the pillow. Now I see why animators do it. Even the simplest actions can be made to work if they’re timed correctly. I think it works quite well contrasted with the full animation of the dog. I probably would have animated the pillow properly, but this looks funny, in a ha ha kind of way.

The whole thing took altogether too long, and wasn’t very efficiently done. This was contributed to by my inexperience in working with a nonstandard model and the human arms I think were my weakest point. Really didn’t like how they came out. I wish people could see the stills of some of the more wild animation, though, it’s ridiculous.

But it’s a human arm.

I’m only now beginning to see something I had never realised before. In my half-waking mind, I see what I have been animating.

This dog becomes the grotesque through external stimuli. It has very little control over it’s own existance. It’s interesting to animate a passive character with an active influence on it. The model no longer makes sense in light of the comb, which forces itself upon the dog. Twice in this scene the dog goes wildly off model, but it seems blissfully right that it should. The hardest parts are the parts that are not wild, that need to be subtle. If there is any life here, it is a mockery, a hideous caricature of what we imagine a dog should be. There is no dog but the one that exists in our mind’s eye.

After all, there is nothing real outside our perception of reality.

God damn, it’s hard to make things consistent.

Really kinda generic emotes, but this is a 20 second sting, not an exploration into a character. I might have pushed it a little too off model in the pushing down action. Dunno.

I have been working on the combing shot for about a week now.

Me and Lara were working on converting her tiny dog design into something more animatable.

Much fun was had warping and twisting the designs, trying to get a handle on what the dog would actually look like.

Eventually, I got the hang of it…

And we worked it out.