As much as this shot has been a complete pain, it's now done! I had to spend a lot of time looking at the weight of the character and how it shifts as he moves over the rope. It took a lot of observation, and some painful attempts, to understand how it should look. I realised that the leg he's stepping forward with raises first, and the weight is pushed forward by the torso so the body is very briefly in free fall. Then the toes of the back foot push upwards giving the height needed to clear the obstacle, and the front foot absorbs the weight of the fall. The idea is that the character is then so pleased to have stepped over in one piece that he forgets the obstacle when moving his other leg, clips the rope and goes down.

I made the recovery quite snappy to give the character a bit of personality. He knows he shouldn't have stepped over in the first place, so tries to regain his composure quickly before anyone realises what he's done. Though the scene is set when the gallery is shut, there would be other guards on patrol so he doesn't want to get in trouble.

In the next few shots the character becomes intrigued by the painting in front him and attempts to touch it. The painting reacts which frightens the guard, but his curiosity gets the better of him and he touches it again. But as soon as he does the painting sucks him inside and the first scene ends. It sounds fairly straight forward when it's put down in words, but it's gonna take a solid amount of hours to finish. While this is happening, Dave and Maik are setting up the second scene inside the painting. James is doing some lighting tests for the gallery also. The plan is that once myself and Joe finish animating the first scene, we'll all texture and light the gallery together and send the scene to render. Once that's done, animation for the second scene begins while the scene itself gets textured. Then we bring all the files together, light them and render them. Then we'll finish the animation for the scene back in the museum and send that to render, then editing begins and we should be done!

In the mean time, here's the finished shot. I'm not going to post each individual shot up on the blog because it doesn't seem like it has any benefits against finishing all the shots and putting a finished scene one playblast of the animation up once I'm done.