Animation
It started with one drawing and before I knew it I was roughing out an animation in Straight Ahead fashion. The sketches range from rough to super rough. I was having fun with this, I’ll probably come back to it and try to fill in all the micro expression changes to bring more clarity to the exchange going on here between our hero and the man off screen.
I need to figure out a better way to display these so you can frame through them rather than scrolling the page, which kind of ruins the effect. Any ideas?
**Update**
I took a rudimentary pass at timing this piece and exported to the quicktime below. I’m sure I’ll change the timing on it quite a bit from this point as I work on it, but this helps show the initial idea.
The other sequence was a Scrat short hinting at the premise for the next Ice Age film, called Scrat’s Continental Crack-Up.
Here is the first stage of a monkey run I'm working on. It's nice and loose yet with a focus on volume and motion/arcs. Done on 3s for the time being. I'll finesse this a bit more before jumping in and making some nice, detailed drawings. Then I'll spend some time doing some good inbetweens. I need lots of practice on that inbetweening. I always end up with jumping jiggley lines.
Here is the first attempt I've taken at a walk cycle in a long, long time. I see plenty of issues with it, but most of them come from my sloppy inbetweening. Overall though I think it is a good step (no pun intending) and I can't wait to get into more personality based walks.
One thing I want to study after doing this is what happens to the knee when a leg starts bearing the weight on it. You can see in my animation that I have the body continue down a bit as the leg absorbs the weight, which causes the knee to move forward. Then the knee changes direction as he pushes off with that same leg. It gives it a strange feeling that doesn't feel right. If you know the answer, please let me know in the comments.
So, after such a long break away from animation I thought it would be wise to redo what I've done previously to catch myself up on what I've learned before moving forward. This time I used the computer to clean things up just a bit. Below are the results. Now that I have these out of the way, look for new stuff soon. My hope is to start in on some walk cycles by next month, in the meantime I still have a few simple, but necessary exercises yet to complete. The explanations for these assignments can be found in previous posts from the first time I did the assignment, but if you have any questions feel free to leave them in the comments and I'll get back as soon as I can.
Pencil, Paper, a Ruler… a little knowledge of perspective and basic timing and voila!
I'm curious how many of you see a cube rotating counterclockwise, and how many are seeing a strange sort of 3D trapezoid rotating clockwise?
A rather quick exercise, compared to the last one. This one is dealing with weight and primariley how it affects timing/spacing. The circle is meant to represent a bowling ball. The quick fall, following by a very small bounce and the object coming to a rest shortly thereafter gives the illusion of weight to the object.
Okay, another animation lesson. This one proved to be tax my brain a lot more than I anticipated. I had to deal with Timing, Anticipation, Action, and Reaction, arcs, Slo-in and Slo-out, and overlapping action. The idea behind it is the seaweed I animated earlier is now sliding left to right across the screen. The movement of the seaweed has to travel up the length of the seaweed at differing lengths of time. So the bottom moves first, and as you go up the more things lag behind in inheriting that movement.
I'm pretty happy with it except for the change in direction on screen left. It feels a bit stiff, like the whole thing is rotating, instead of the movement traveling up the spine of the seaweed like it should.
I kept this one loose and rough.