Fantastic Voyage: Tortoise Eating a Leaf Animation

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Started Animating the neck of my saddle back to see how I would have to animate and edit it to make the scenes work together. To achieve this I made blend shapes for the neck and made a new one for each movement, so one for the extension, so for the mouth opening and one for the neck pulling back.   The videos above show the different playblasts I had to take for the reaching up and for grabbing the leaf, with the top one being the edited video I complete in Premier Pro. 

Because I needed the tortoise to grab and move the leaf I decided to make two separate models and divide up the actions, making the pause between the grabbing of the leaf the editing point to join the two actions together. I did find this hard at first, especially choreographing the different models and dividing up how each scene would go, I think from this for my future animating I might need to lay out a plan beforehand to figure out how the sequence will need to go.

I used a blend shape for each, this is how I laid out the sequence for the animation and labelled the points so it would make it easier. To switch between the models I put them on layers and playblasted each models sequence individually, I also did this to the leaf which I hid in the first vid and copied and parented to the second model so I could make a third blend shape with it. I am happy with how it turned out, and making this also make me realised how tricky this animation might turn out, so I'm gonna have to be more precise with the videos and laying it out.