Weeks 2, 3 and 4

Hi everyone, I did not gave up the blog. It's just this past weeks have been intense, which is great :)

First I would like to share this motivational video, I find it really inspiring, especially for those who are starting their artistic journey now:

So much to cover, I think I'll do it in topics : p

First I'll tell about the assigments.

Week 2:

This week we learned a bit about the 12 principles of animation: Timing and spacing, Squash and Stretch, Overlapping Action and Follow Through, Appeal, Staging, Solid Posing, Slow in and Slow out, Anticipation, Arcs, Straight Ahead and Pose to Pose, Exaggeration and Secondary Action. You can find more about each of them in these books:

"Illusion of Life" - read chapter 3;
"Drawn to Life, vol 1" - pag. 4;
"Character Animation Crash Course" - pag 75;
"How Cheat in Maya" - the first part of the book.

The first assignment was more of a warm up so you can establish a workflow and get used to the program. We had to go out and sketch away, any pose we found interesting we had to translate into sketches. We were supposed to do 10 poses and choose one for doing with Stu, the 3d rig we use for poses in class 1.

Here are my 10 sketches:

The chosen pose gives the idea of someone exhausted, it changed a bit when done in 3d, as we have many concern on how to convey our poses. We don't want to be symmetrical, it should have a nice and clear silhouette, a nice line of action and, of course. It must have appeal. With all this in mind and with help and feedback of all my AM friends I got to this result:

I was pretty satisfied when I turned it in, as I knew I had polished it to the best of my abilities with the help of my peers feedback. My mentor liked the actual pose, he said it was done, but also said I missed a few important very important things. The most important thing in a pose is it's meaning, what emotion you want to convey, the second is body mechanics, the believability of the pose, and for last is the design, how beautiful your pose is. He said that its all right to change the final pose compared to the sketch, as long as you don't change the meaning. In this case it changed from exhaustion to pain. He also gave a lot of suggestion of subtle changes that could be made to give back this pose it's meaning. I'll be reposting my work with all the fixes in the end of the term.

Week 3:

This week we learned the importance of planning your work. Some say that you should spend at least 25% of your time planning your shot. The most important tools for your planning are observation, video reference, thumbnails and feedback.

Observing life is a huge part of the animator world. You have to be able to understand how things move in real life before you can actually create the illusion in your computer. (and for non-animators out there...no, the computer don't do it for you :P )

Video reference: taking video reference, be that of films, youtube, or shot by yourself (which if preferible) is a great way to study a movement.

Thumbnails: Drawing is the best way to organize your ideas and visualize your poses. It's faster than doing it on 3d and you don't have to worry with details, Even stick figure can go a long way.

Feedback: If I were to mention one thing that AM has taught me in the last weeks, I'd say that how feedback is important for your work to succeed. It's amazing the difference in quality of your first raw idea and the one you get after you take the feedback of your peers. Animation is about team work, always remember that. So the more feedback you give, the more you will get and the more you will learn.

And don't stop with just animators, many times asking a non-animator for feedback is a great way to improve your work (A friend in AM named Derek showed me that. Thanks Derek).

Ok, now for the assignment:

This week was our first animation assignment, everyone was excited to make that the bouncing ball. We were asked to make a soccer ball or a basketball bounce. It could roll off screen or it could stop. We had a hundred frames to pull it of.

I chose the basketball and for it to stop in the screen.

Here's the planning for it:

The main problem with this plan is that if we get many bounces with the same amount of frames like bounces with 4 frames, it will appear to be a ping pong ball. But as I was doing the animation it got sorted out, some just by observation but huge parts cause of all the feedback I got :)
Here is the animation:

Overall my mentor liked the assignment and gave a lot of feedback to make it better :) I'll be sure to do it by the end of term. For now I should focus on each assignments :)

This result, again, and I'll keep repeating it, was reached thanks to the feedback of my peers.

The second part of the assignment was to make an excitement pose. The drill was the same as the first pose but now we had a clear goal.

Here are my sketches:

My mentor mentioned to make the sketches more close in proportion to the rig we are using. So I tried this new approach, I hope you guys like it. 

In the Q&A we were talking about staging and layout so I wanted to play with it a bit. My peers liked the camera angle of sketch 10 a lot too so I decided to go with that. 

Here is the result:

As I said I wanted to experiment with staging so I tried to put stu in a place more appealing than just the middle. I pushed the line of action as far as I could too and started to add a silhouette pic so it's easier to critique the pose. The main issue in this is that, a bird view camera make it difficult to determine if the character is on the ground and the level he is in. So I was told to avoid this kind of camera angle in the future. But all in all I liked this pose a lot, with this I experimented posting it for my friends in facebook to see if they could read the emotion I was trying to portrait, that was a great Idea Derek had, to ask non animators for a feedback too. It proved very useful!

Week 4:

Just sent my work for this week earlier today. This week was all about timing and spacing. One of the most important principles in animation. You can find out more about this principle in the books I mentioned in the beginning of this post.

This week assignment was to do a Heavy / Light Ball bouncing. We had 120 frames to do it and our mentor asked that both balls stopped while still in screen. We could choose to add a collision or not.

Here's my plan for the assignment:

Getting the weight of the light ball before and after the collision was ther hardest part. Still think I could have made it lighter after the collision but ran out of space and frames. Let's wait for the critique to see how I went :)

Here is the video assignment:

I worked in this video A LOT hehehe. And I have to thank all the wonderful suggestions and feedback I got from all my AM friends. Derek helped me a lot with the polishing, thanks a lot dude!!

Now all we have to do is work on the next assignment that is a Devastation pose and an animation of a pendulum. And, of course, wait for the mentor critique. The theme for week 5 is Overlapping Action. Francis Emvola was kind enough to direct me to this great tutorial that I hope will be of use for you guys as well. Thank you my friend.

 

Wow, sorry for the long post, I tried to be as brief as possible. So you guys must have noticed how I insist about getting feedback. And I will continue to do so, cause I know how important it is. Animation is a team work, it simple can't by just one person. There's just so much you can reach alone so get out there and be supportive and kind to your peers. It will pay off, you will learn a lot and make friends while doing so. That's one of the beauty of animation, it's a very humbling art form and you will never stop learning. Well, I think that's it for today, see you in the next post! Thanks for reading!