Baseball bat swing & Nick Park

This weeks task was to have the character swing and hit a baseball with a bat as convincingly as possible so I began my week with some action analysis of myself swinging a stick. it soon became apparent that I know nothing about baseball so decided instead to rely on YouTube reference videos of enthusiastic American MLB players. I spent a few days drawing and blocking out the key poses and though it seemed like a long time to spend on this I feel it paid off later in the animation phase. Alongside this I also attended life drawing as well as an acting class held on the roof of the building with panoramic views over Bristol. On Friday I attended a masterclass with Nick Park who answered all of our numerous questions about his films, video assist and the future of stop motion. He was also kind enough to agree to have his photo taken with me and my slightly dog eared Gromit! (pardon the pun). I finished shooting early and so decided to give my puppet a thorough clean and as you can see from the photo it was like something out of a nightmare...