Week 6: Overlapping Action

View animation HERE.

This has definitely been the hardest assignment for me thus far. Up to this point I was thinking, "This animation thing isn't nearly as hard as I thought it would be." Suffice it to say I ate those words for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day that week.

Our assignment was to animate 'Tailor' - the little bouncing ball with a squirrel tail - doing at least 3 jumps. I didn't realize what a challenge it would be. I will no longer be tricked by cute characters with fluffy tails. Anyhow, the concept of "overlapping action" was the animation element du jour.

The simplest illustration of this concept is the pendulum with a weighted ball on the end, made up of several joints or segments. There is successive breaking of joints, and the essence of it is that things connected in such a way do not all move at the same time. and the timing of when each successive joint moves will describe the weight and attitude of the thing.

Since I felt I didn't quite get enough anticipation experience in last week's assignment, I tried to add a bit more in this time and felt a lot more successful and confident with that particular concept, but it proved too complicated a setup for the level of my overlapping skills at this point. I tried several different approaches in desperation: copying and offsetting curves from segment to segment. That looked like crap. Then I did it straight ahead, just animating by the seat of my pants. That made me get lost in my own head and looked like even stinkier crap. Then I tried pose to pose, but i didn't know how to see inbetween the frames yet, so that liked like, you guessed it: crap-o-la.

I was so stressed out that I animated straight all night long on Friday night (assignments are due Sunday, remember), which didn't help at all. I just thought, stupidly, that the longer I stuck at it, the better it would get. Not so, my friend. You just go cross-eyed.

I had watched Scrat (the saber-toothed squirrel character in the movie Ice Age from Blue Sky Studios) footage over and over, and even bought Disney's Sword in the Stone to study the squirrels in that, but for some reason overlapping action was eluding me. It's like, I understood the concept, and knew what looked wrong, but couldn't make it look right for the life of me.

I must have animated over 20 hours that week. It was insane. I was going insane. I animated up to the very last minute in a coffee shop in Pocatello, Idaho (I was on "vacation"), where the employees were kind enough to let me stay an hour after closing while they cleaned so I could finish my assignment.

The final product was nothing I was remotely proud of, but I knew I had done my best. And despite my frustration, all was not lost. I just had to tell myself, "It's okay. You'll get it. You'll work through it. It's not the end of the world and doesn't mean you'll be a crappy animator." Bobby Beck's encouraging words came to mind - to take deep breaths and not stress about it so much here in the beginning.

If I already knew how to do it, I wouldn't be here trying to learn it.

Never give up.

Week 5 Revisions

View animation HERE.

So according to my mentor, Charles Alleneck at ILM,'s suggestions, I made my revisions. In my Stu pose, he recommended making the arms heavier, rotating the headstone to get a better silhouette and putting slightly more distance between the figures. Pretty minor changes really, but what a difference they make. I already commented on the things that neeed changing n my anticipating bouncing ball animation, I fixed those and Charles liked the revisions. All in all, a successful week. Looking back at it, the ball is feeling a little too gelatinous for my taste, but hindsight is 20/20...

Doug Dooley at Pixar, part-time mentor, dropped me a line apologizing for dissuading me from my original plan, but I reassured him that the advice was good and that I was glad for the reality check. I really took his advice to heart and used my creativity not by having my ball bounce around all crazy like a pinball machine, but by AVOIDING the obstacles. Every bounce nearly misses, and the pieces were carefully re-arranged so that the ball would contact the ground and nothing else. He said he loved my solution and that it made him laugh.

Here's my full response:

thanks dooley!

glad you got a kick out of my creative "solution". theoretically, you're supposed to do the overachiever stuff INSTEAD of the regular assignment. some people did both, but i'm totally glad you steered me away from my original idea. i learned a lot more about anticipation and squash and stretch this way than i would have otherwise, and i feel my squash and stretch is a lot stronger than it was before. had i gone with my original plan i would have spent my time wondering, "now how would a ball react to this angle on a surface?..." i was even contemplating BUILDING a similar set-up and videotaping a ball going through it all, which would have been fun or whatever, but kind of not the point of the whole thing.

(still not sure that my anticipation was successful. i really liked it at first, but now i'm not so sure. any thoughts on that?)

i'm seeing a lot of student work with obstacle courses that have weak anticipation and lots of problems with their timing and spacing with their ping-pong antics. i think giving the option in the first place probably isn't the best idea. would have been cool if the assignment was to do 4 different anticipation variations or something like that... i posted your response on my blog and got lots of positive comments about it. someone even asked me if they could re-post it on another animation board. so don't feel bad about giving good advice.

plenty of time for meat after i've learned how to digest the milk.

thanks again! your feedback is very helpful.

kenshi


He responded:

Well, I think you're understanding the principles of anticipation. If I
were doing it I might try to roll it back ward a little, roll it forward
into a squash, and then have it pop up. You might be getting carried
away with the squash and stretch in the begining too. Everyone is, and
I don't think its bad to go over the top with it in the begining. When
you exaggerate, you can't mess it up and have it go unnoticecd. Its
always better to tone down afterward, if the director wants it to.
Most people are keeping it exaggerated, and it seems to be the rule of
thumb. It makes the characters seem more like living things, but there
is an appeal in that.

The ending is completely right on. If I were going nuts, I'd say you
could (I emphasize could here) put one small squash and stretch on its
roll after its last bounce to sort of give it a super small last bounce,
but hey it looks great.

dooley

I didn't quite understand the full import of what he was saying til now. It was a Q&A with Gavin Moran, animation "mercenary", that really helped open my eyes to the concepts Dooley was referring to. But I'll talk more about that later...

Week 5 sketches - page 1

Week 5 sketches - page 2

Week 5 sketches - page 3

So there's a farm right down the street from my work - in the middle of Utah suburbia. Historical Wheeler Farm. Never paid it much attention, til now.... Now that I'm a fledgling animator, I go there all the time; during my lunch breaks, on the weekends. I'm not used to drawing animals other than humans, and it just tickles me that the same forces and rhythms you employ to sketch humans applies just the same to animals, only in different arrangements. It's like studying aliens, drawing animals.

My personal favorite of the bunch is the dog. He was taking his owner for a walk.

Week 5: Anticipation

Yeah, you wouldn't know it from my previous week 5 planning sketch, but this assignment was actually about anticipation followed by a realistically moving bouncing ball, not "how to get a ball through a fancy obstacle course". So, I pulled way back and just went about the animation the way Bobby suggested I do it, which is to layer the animation. Do the basic timing first. Just up and down with no spacing (back or forth). Then I just layered all the other stuff in, like squash and stretch. Then I did the spacing (translation of object from left to right), and finally the rotation so that the stretched ball would follow the arc of action.

Oh, I actually started with the anticipation. The way I envisioned it was like one of those "test your strength" games they have at carnivals, where you have to hit a target as hard as you can with a heavy hammer. You have to have a deliberate upswing and then pull that hammer down for all you're worth if you're going to get any power out of the swing. So if the squash is the anticipation, the stretch just prior would be the "anticipation of the anticipation", which is one of those things where the more you do it, the cartoonier it gets.

Only area where I went wrong is the direction of the anticipation. As you can see from the still above, I have the ball leaning in the direction it plans to go, when really it should be anticipating the opposite direction (my mentor, Charles Alleneck, pointed out to me). There are a few other minor tweaks it needs; fixing stickiness on one of the contacts that I somehow missed when I did my clean up pass (I found that having two contact frames towards the final bounces just doesn't work, so I fixed it, but missed one of them), and not diminishing the upward momentum of the ball so quickly. But other than that, Charles said it was a job well done.

My only regret is that I didn't try different types of anticipation. Seeing what some of the other students did, I realized that my approach was pretty boring. Some of them had the ball roll, or even scoot back and then start rotating like mad to build up speed, like muscle cars revving at a red light, and then "PYOOOOooooooo!!" - it was off. Some had the ball squish like setting hips into the ground in order to launch.

So I emailed a suggestion to the good folks at AnimationMentor, suggesting that they revise the assignment to focus a little more on the anticipation by having us do three separate bounces, with a different anticipation each time.

Would be great to have another week to work on it, but alas, we're moving ahead.

Here's my unrevised animation: http://kenshi.daeva.org/animation/C1_Sess5 _Assignment_10.avi

Week 4 sketches - page 2

Week 4 sketches - page 1

The figure on the left I sketched 6 times. Only posted the most successful ones, going from general and gestural to more specific and stylized. The couple upper center was at Red Rock, a popular restaurant in downtown Salt Lake. I am having fun taking people's characteristics and exaggerating them; something I didn't allow myself the privilege of much before.

Bottom right corner is from our weekly staff meeting at Origin. Can you just smell the boredom, or what?

Squash & Stretch Contact Positions Sketch

Week 4: Squash and Stretch

Week 4 Assignment

This is a little late in coming, but I wanted this to kind of be a repository for all my assignments and what I learned from them. The assignment here was to take the bouncing ball from the previous week and add squash and stretch to it. I tried several different approaches. In Richard Williams' book "The Animator's Survival Kit", he talks about stretching into the contact with the ground, then squashing, and then stretching out of it, off the ground.

My first tests with this approach were not satisfactory to my eye, but looking back, that was probably due to timing/spacing issues, and not due to the approach. A fellow student's 2D pencil test of a bouncing ball did catch my attention though, and he had the ball maintain a perfectly round shape except for 3 places - frame before contact was slightly stretched, then it made contact in the recovered position (perfectly round), then squashed down, stretched off the ground, and then back to round as it continued through the arc of the next bounce. That's the technique I ended up employing.

What my mentor and other students had to say? Too sticky. Seems to stick to the ground at the contact points.

That week, I got to take part in a special interactive session with Bobby Beck (CEO and president of AnimationMentor, former Pixar animator) where he took our files and went through some things with us in a more interactive way. He used a new Q&A tool where he could see the chat, so he would ask everybody (I would say there were about 30 people in the session) a question such as "What makes an object look heavy?" and we all would type in our answers. And then he looked at a few of the students' files to illustrate points, one of them being mine.

First of all, he got on my case for not following directions (oops...). It was supposed to be animated from a pure side view. I had a teeny bit of perspective on my shot, because I wanted it to be clear that it was in a racquetball court. I thought you would still be able to see the arcs just fine, but I promised to be more careful and follow the directions more explicitly in the future.

Oh, the overachiever part of the assignment was to add another ball with different weight. He suggested a bowling ball in the lecture, but again, I was civilly disobedient and just did a heavy ball.

So anyhow, in the special session, his comments were: take out the squash and stretch in the heavy ball completely, to make it really heavy and rigid (like a bowling ball), diminish the height of the bounces even more and get rid of the last tiny bounce entirely. On the bouncing ball, his main comments were to add more squash and stretch in the air and make contact before squashing.

See the animation here: http://kenshi.daeva.org/animation/C1_Sess4_Assignment_05heavy.mov

Week 5 Assignment: Devastation

Pose #4

So, the assignment this week is to do a pose best expressing "devastation" with the Stu character. I have to turn this in tomorrow, so I would really like to hear from all you lurkers which one you like best and why. Look at body language, look at design, look at pose readibility, look at the strength of the silhouette - but most importantly, which image evokes the strongest emotional response? Just add a comment under the one you like most, along with any further ideas or suggestions you may have. Thanks!

*Update*: Pose #4 won out. So interesting to hear different peoples' responses. About 20 people responded.

Pose #3

Pose #2

Pose #1