Some adjustments on the animation & a couple of good animation sites.

I got some feedback on the animation yesterday and did some adjustments on the timing. It all happened a bit too quick, so I have added an additional 50 frames which hopefully will provide the viewer with enough time to understand what's happening.
At the moment I am struggling a bit with the tail on the first jumps. The tail is a bit to stiff at the moment so I need to work more on that.
Also, the staging you see in the preview is not the one I will be using for the piece, it's mainly staged this way to help me see if the ball and tail "behaves" as I want it too. It needs to look good from all angles, not just for the camera.
(The staging will probably be more like the one seen in the storyboard I posted earlier).

Here is the newest wip_clip:



You can see where the additional frames have been added, it is after the ball slides. It now stands still longer and the turn around is slower than it was in the previous clip. The time I have provided for these two actions are useful to help tell the story and build anticipation. I like the turn better this way, but it stands still a bit too long after the slide. So I could either keep the turning speed and cut down a bit on the time used on the "squirrels" reaction, or I could keep the reaction time and make the turn a bit faster and try and build up more anticipation to the reaction.
I would just have to try both methods and see which one I prefer.


- Oh, and here is a few really helpful sites I try to check out frequently:

http://www.animationmentor.com/resources/webinars/

(This site is probably well known to many, but I'm posting it anyway).
There aren't that many "webinars" on this site, but the ones they have are really interesting, inspiring and helpful!
The latest webinar is with, Dr. Stuart Sumida whom I had the pleasure of talking too at Animex 2010. He is an expert in anatomy and during Animex he talked about how he was employed by Dreamworks to help their animators animate the dragons in "How To Train Your Dragon".

Another great site is;

http://graphics.pixar.com/library/

Where you could read up on a selection of papers written by PIXAR that shows us how they do things over there.