so in that blurry photo you can see me.
and a whip.
and someone whipping me.
in the neck.

so yeah, it was a good day at work. we’ve been working on our whip animations and tech and all that for the Indiana Jones game but there’s only so much that you can get from looking through a dvd and google videos. so we brought in a professional whip-o-grapher to show us how it’s done. it was a great time. getting to see how a professional moves with a weapon like that was just great. to see how she handled it just walking around and whatnot, pure gold. reference rocks.

she started with basic stuff like whip cracking. then she moved into attacks and stuff that involved “volunteers.” i say volunteers in quotes because it involved only the animators and it started with the newest members to the team (me being #2). so she would whip poles out of our hands and for a short while she was whipping it around one of my co-worker’s arms and yanking him toward her. then it was my turn again and she started with my torso. she’d whip me and then yank and i went spinning like a top. it was fun. and, surprisingly it wasn’t painful so i agreed to letting her move on to my neck. likewise, it wasn’t painful but it looked cool.

also cool was learning about whips. like learning that the crack of the whip is from the tip breaking the speed of sound and creating a sonic boom. the tip moves at something like 750 miles per hour but could go even faster. the crack is also the apex of it’s energy. as soon at the whip cracks, the majority of its power dissipates. so if you get hit with a whip after it’s cracked (like we were), you’re in good shape.

just some good stuff to know. you know, in case you run across some thugs with whips…