Guitar Shot Progression

Guitar Shot Progression from Nicole Ridgwell on Vimeo.

Since I had always wanted to do a piece involving music, I was super excited about starting this shot. I found the dialogue clip on youtube from a girl named Marie Digby. I spent about a week trying to find the character and did a few different reference takes. The setting was a girl talking to a fellow band-mate that she has a crush on. I had a lot of personal experience in this department to draw from, I've been playing in bands since I was in grade school.

Once I was happy with my reference I did a stepped blocking pass then moved into spline pretty quickly. I like to block stepped but switch to splines early and animate the rest of the shot layered, especially with a close-up shot like this one.

Of course there's lots of room to improve, but this shot was a labor of love and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out! Special thanks to my teacher Victor Navone and The Animation Collaborative :)