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.