Thursday 24 November 2011

Animation Week: Day 3 & 4 & 5


25/11/11

Over the past two days we've moved on from focusing on how gender contributes to walk cycles to how age affects movement. Like the walk cycles, we spent time studying the different ways in which you could portray an old person sitting down.

I took plenty of reference footage, but decided to knock out a few key pose sketches to help aid me when animating later. I didn't do this for the walk cycle and I feel it really did negatively affect my animation. There's something about actually drawing out the key poses that makes you understand the actual stages of a walk, rather than just watching someone walk. Unfortuatley I haven't drawn in a while and the key pose sketches were slightly, er.. terrible. But it did help me in thinking where I could exaggerate certain movements to emphasise strain and relief.

I started to observe that an older person would be weaker and a lot more frail and thus would need to stabilise themseleves a lot more than a flexible young child. We were told to focus more on our instinct on how to animate rather than rely on on the graph editor and maths - just use them as a tool to clean up later. I thought this was really good advice and it felt a lot better to just go for it than be really technical with my work. Susannah kept nagging us to actually get up and move around; to actually experience the actions ourselves, to better understand the process we were documenting. I thought this was also really valuable advice as we're constantly in front of a computer, and not only is it a good way again to better understand the movement, but it also broke up the tediousness of key-framing ha! It was refreshing to sit back down again and have a fresh new understanding of what I was doing each time I did this. Nice one Susannah!

Thanks again Olly for my amazing reference footage, what a babe. First 3 videos are references for and older person sitting down into a chair. The last video is a reference for a young person getting into a chair.



















































These past few days I found a lot more interesting and useful as we spent longer trying to perfect just one action. The task also had more freedom in the way that we could personalise and make our animations original. I learnt a lot more about the graph editor today thanks to Campbell. He showed me how to move my key frames in one go and how to change the pace of the entire animation. Here's a quick play blast, again. My old man sits down, then has a sudden heart attack and dies. I've only got this far at the moment, but I hope to finish the short animation piece with a transparent old man getting up from the chair, as if he hasn't realised anythings happened.

I really think I need to improve my drawing skills, they are definitely rusty, and as I've discovered it really does help to block everything out first, you feel so much more prepared and the process seems to move a LOT faster. Especially considering I'm aiding my animator in my group project with animation, I really need to get it up to par so that my final project looks convincing and interesting.

That's all folks (for now).


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