Week 7: 1-Leg

View the final, revised animation here.

I started this session out by doing a test jump with our new character: 1-Leg. It was simple, and fairly successful, I thought. It was basically a copying exercise, which I think is an important skill to have: See it, break it down, and re-create it. No need to reinvent the wheel...yet.

I saved that for the day my assignment was due. Just kidding. But really, balancing a social life with fulltime work and full/part-time school is not the easiest. I often find myself saying things like: "Sorry to have to eat and run!" And I often hear things like: "Wow, so you really DO exist!" which I take to mean my noted absence was beginning to affect my actual existence? Am I still here? Pinch, pinch. Whew. Glad they weren't right...

On the contrary, I feel like I exist on a different level than I did before. I exist MORE, if that's possible. Honestly. I still wear glasses to read and work on the computer and watch movies, but I have been given new eyes.

But enough about the medical miracles learning animation can produce, and back to Mr. 1-Leg. Since I had already done a basic jump, I decided to totally disregard Doug Dooley's advice from a few weeks ago to keep it simple and tempted fate by animating the Pixar intro with 1-Leg instead of Luxo, Jr. and KENSHI:ANIMATOR instead of PIXAR:ANIMATION STUDIOS. They both had an "I" in the name; that was the clincher.

I felt justified disregarding Dooley, though, because I had already done the simple jump. And besides, it would give me a chance to get into more complex timing and a bit of storytelling and character. AND I would be able to really regard my newly acquired Irish Animatin' Advice from Gavin Moran (see last post) by watching my budding animation realtime AMAP (as much as possible).

It took all day. And i ended up going 20 or 30 frames over my limit. Charles, my mentor, applauded my restraint, saying that if he goes over, he usually goes whole hog over ("Well, I've already gone over, so I'm going to take as many frames as I need!") That's the kind of thinking that causes teenage pregnancy. So, of course, in my revision, I went ahead and made my animation good and pregnant and added 20 additional frames - you can get away with murder in the name of timing...

So yeah, Charles' only comments in his critique was only measly little arc that hung too high on one of the jumps and how the timing of the thing would be improved by adding more frames.

I felt like I had made a personal comeback, like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, only I didn't fall from as high as she did. That's the nice thing about being an amateur - when you trip, it's not supposed to be quite as devastating (but you cry, anyway. Makes for more drama.)

I even added a twist at the end of my piece. A catapulting "I" of "KENSHI" that will just not be kept down. It's a symbol of my indomitable spirit. The weight of spectacular animation potential will not crush me. I will fight back and rise above. Even if I have to simplify the hell out of the Pixar intro that I'm making a parody of (nice segue, kenshi).

I did find that for time's sake, I had to really pare the action down. Not that the original was oh, so complex. I had significantly less time to do it though, and really wanted to capture the same feel. The answer? Simplify, simplify, simplify, but keep your eye single to the vision.

Worked like a charm. You should try it. Maybe I'll try it with life. Maybe then I won't have so much extraneous junk lying around getting in the way of meaning and purpose.

Simplify AMAP. Watch your animation and live your life in realtime AMAP. Stop using the acronym AMAP AMAP...

Gavin Moran Q&A Session

This was an eye-opener.

But first, an introduction: Gavin has been a character animator for 10 years. He was born in the Republic of Ireland where he attended college til he didn't. He came to the United States in 1994 to pursue his dream of animating or at least finding some other way of not working for a living. He has worked in various different studios including Disney, Wildbrain, Sony Imageworks, and Dreamworks on projects such as Dinosaur, Hubert's Brain, Stuart Little 2, Spiderman 2, and Shark Tale. Currently he is working on Dreamworks and Aardman's latest movie 'Flushed Away'. He talks about himself in the third person and only owns 2 pairs of shoes. (Bio and picture taken from the AnimationMentor.com public site.)

The biggest thing I took away from Gavin was this: Watch your animation in realtime as much as possible. A common beginner's mistake is slow timing and overanimating forces. Why does this happen? Overanalyzation. They go over it slow in their heads and it shows up in their animation. Richard Williams (Animator's Survival Kit) says the same thing happens to older animators. They start moving and thinking slower and their animation reflects that. It doesn't make sense to live in a frame-by-frame mindset all the time, cause the audience never sees it that way in a theater - they are watching it in realtime. Who cares if it looks right frame by frame if it doesn't read at 24 frames per second?

I immediately changed my approach after hearing this bit o' wisdom. It reminded me of another piece of advice I got years ago in figure drawing class: Look at the model as much as possible, not your drawing. The majority of your time should be spent in observation. Otherwise, you get so focused on all the little marks that the overall picture suffers from lack of vision. The drawing begins to serve itself instead of the marks supporting your overall idea.

Another analogy that Gavin drew was between animation and sculpture. You start with the big, broad strokes from the rough stone (your key poses), and then whittle the thing down (the timing, the spacing, arcs, anticipation, overlap) til you get a polished, intelligent, nuanced piece (the clean up from stepped blocking to smooth animation curves).

Like Gavin said, it really is a process of breaking things down. But you have to do in a somewhat organized way or you'll get completely lost. That's why AnimationMentor is so incredible in its teaching approach. The basics first. Milk before meat.