Class 2 - Session 1

(Read image left to right, top to bottom.)

These are my planning sketches for my first assignment. He's tripping on a sidewalk. It was my first heavy duty reference session. I had a friend videotape me with me holding my arms behind my back. Had I read ahead, I would have known that I would be adding arms the next week and should have filmed myself with arms and all, but oh well. It worked well enough.

I don't think I got the hang of overlap in the spine and head very well. Still not sure if I do yet. Need more practice on that and about a hundred other body mechanic things.

(I'm writing this almost 3 months after the fact, so I have a bit of distance on this, by the way...)


So yeah, this is not a good example of animation. The timing is too slow and there's too much extraneous movement. The overlap in the body during the trip isn't bad, but the timing happens in slow motion and it's not supposed to. Another victim of overanalyzed animation. Also the head could drag a bit more on the way down on the stomp. If I remember correctly, I hardly animated the neck at all - just kept it in the head, which is not the best way to go. I have since changed my methods and always start an extremity movement with the "trunk" of the extremity, be it the neck, the shoulder... Dave Burgess (who is at DreamWorks now) subbed for Victor at our Q&A last night and he recommended we always get the body involved, even on something as simple as a head turn (no one robotically moves just the head, except for well, a mechanical robot...)

Looking back, there is definitely lots of room for improvement on this animation. Still, it's not something I'm going to put on my demo reel. Not engaging enough.

Going from a ball with legs to a body with spine and head with legs was definitely a big transition. The next logical step in complexity that we've been preparing for this whole time, but pretty intimidating nonetheless.

Something I'm also learning is that rough blocking is the easiest and funnest part of the process (so far). Getting good poses comes from the planning and experimenting stage of things, but once they are in, it's fairly easy to move things around, especially if you have set keys on every part of the body on the same frame so you can move everything at once and maintain the integrity of your poses.

But beware, beware. Just because you can throw poses into the computer and move things around to get passable timing in a fairly short amount of time does NOT mean that the rest of the process will go so quickly or smoothly...

Here are some more sketches from my sketchbook. They are all exercises in finding key poses. Hopefully with practice (Dave Burgess talked about getting "miles on your pencil") I will get to the point of being able to animate traditionally. That's one of my big goals because I think it's important that CG incorporates as much of the organic and loose feel of 2D as it can, so understanding how things work in 2D is essential, I feel, to make this happen.

Exciting stuff.