I realised at Animation Mentor that they like to ration you on limbs for characters like you’re on a diet. Then when you’re really hankering for something else to animate, they give you the typical dish of a ball – with a side of tail!

That’s Tailor, a character that should mimic a squirrel (password = tailor). The animation is an exercise in secondary motion and overlapping action.

When I was at Uni, I couldn’t get enough of overlap (password = wave):

Woah ho HO! Ribbons, ponytail, handbag, dress, boobs, I just didn’t want to leave anything out did I?

And before we had Tailor, we had a pendulum:

As simple as it looks, I actually struggled with this pendulum. Ironing out the stickiness of the segments of the arm and finding the right speed for the moving platform took a bit of experimentation. If you didn’t get it right, you could have the arm breaking so it wasn’t smooth or you could have it so smooth and slow it looked underwater. However, compared to my 2010 pendulum (password = swing):

– the timing is better and it’s a bit less mechanical.

Stay tuned to see what limbs are rationed out next!