Wizard of Baseball

Quadrapeds - Animal Walk

Chose a household cat, nice and fat too! Second version, the attitude walk, was much more successful because I planned out all the body and head rotations first.

Animal Walk Animation (Cat)

Includes bonus mutant cat!!! A.k.a. my first attempt. It's a funny little thing...

Pretty happy with this. There are a few minor things to adjust with the legs and body, and fixing the arc loop on the head. Then it's only adding the taill.

Do You Even Lift?

I am quite happy with this piece of animation, for just over 2 weeks worth of work. I didn't realise how ambitious I was getting but I'm glad that I was. The task was to animate a Lift, a character picking up a heavy object, but focus more on the anticipation of the action.

Jump Around!

Jump time! What happens when you take your keyframes and boring layout, and work into them more? Well I came out jump that still looks like it's keyframes but has pretty layout :D
- Might have to go fullscreen to see what's happening

The most important thing is the hips. It's true. Even though the majority of this animation is exposed on 4s or higher (4 frames per image at 25fps) it still reads.

Yawn

Animated yawn. Important to know how the shoulders move around the torso and having a strong arc in the back.

The yawn with the twitching has got a little more energy to it, but I don't think I executed it very well.

Production Film Work 1

I was fortunate enough to find my on to working one of the 3rd year films called Scramble. I have been given the task of designing and animating some of the background characters. After working on the designs, the director gave me the shot to animate with. A perspective walk... OF COURSE! My first time at doing a perspective walk; I spent quite a bit of time working out the key frames and breakdowns but after that it wasn't too much trouble. I now have a nice little animation on twos that I need to cleanup in the coming week.

Stop Motion Workshop

I participated in a 2-person team workshop to create two pieces of Stop Motion Animation. One used the medium of paper cut-outs and the other used a rigged model. Credit to Ali Guzzo for working with me on these animations

I was animating the pink character and the box (on left), and my partner, the green character (on right). The medium of cut-out animation is somewhat stressful, I have found, with trying to keep the different pieces of paper in the right places as you take your fingers off them. But overall, I think this animation was pretty successful.

A little less stressful was the puppet animation. With magnetic feet and a rig inside the model, changing the pose for each frame was a lot easier; however, knocking the camera mid-shot can be ruinous. We took turns between animating the character and plasticine ball so we both had an equal share of the animating.

As much fun as both these projects were (and I mean just the Puppet animation) I much prefer the freedoms that come with the 2D medium of drawn animation.

Character Performance

Once you get a basic grip on Disney's animation principles you can then start to think about animating the performance of a character. Got to show him/her thinking about the actions before they do them otherwise it won't be believable as a character performance. I had to create a 10-20 second performance based around a character at a bus stop. Here it is:

I didn't think I was being ambitous but every time I drew breakdowns and inbetweens I kept having to increase the timing so that the pacing was good. As a result there is still a lot I can add to this piece but in the 2 weeks we had, this was all I could manage.

Attitude Walk Week 2

Second attempt, I decided to go crazy.
I started with the basic parts of the character: the body, legs and head because everything else is secondary action (So is the head but I prefer to animate that at the same time as the body)

What I had inadvertently done was made the stretchty legs change in volume as the character moves. I was aware I was distorting the figure but was not thinking about the volume of the character until somebody pointed it out to me.

If I was going to take this further I would introduce some arms, eyes, nose and maybe some fox-ears (all with their own follow through actions.

Distorting the figure during the animation achieves a really nice elastic, flexible feel to the character (but I wouldn't want everything to feel like that).

Attitude Walk Week 1

A walk with attitude: leading with the chest, feet & knees swinging outwards and a double bounce between each step results in a bobbling swagger fella.

Walk Cycle

The walk cycle inafamously hard, but actually pretty easy when it's an emotionless walk from the side on.

I exaggerated the distance the arms swing out too much. And as a result the arm feels like it is snapping forward. Other than that, I am pretty happy with the results.

Train Your Brain (Competition)

Train Your Brain is a competition run by The Art Department (http://theartdepartment.org/) and for the DeviantArt community, that I am not an overly zealous fan of (but that's another story). I've decided to enter a film for the animation category because the prize looks pretty damn good (Private tour around Pixar Studios - for two =O ).

This has sparked my creativity and I've come up with what I think is a decent idea. While I've had nothing to do in the studio I was storyboarding this. I won't explain the whole premise of what's happening because that should be pretty self explanatory, which I think it is. :)
 

Not only do I have about 2 weeks to make a whole minutes worth of animation, I've given myself the pleasurable challenge of doing most of it in first person. I really want to be creative and experimental with how I put this animation together, particularly with the transitions and the crazy effects at the end.

The name is subject to changes.

Here's a link to the page if you want to check it out for yourself:
http://ayame-kenoshi.deviantart.com/art/Train-Your-Brain-Contest-336449766#animation

Pantomime Sack Week 2

Second week was kind of as boring as the first and I think i got a little sloppy in the last few frames. The big chore was scanning in 220 pages of drawings. But in the end, I am pretty happy with the results.

There are some issues with some of the inbetweens or the pre-drop (still) but nothing that I have the desire to spend more time on. If I was to do the task again, I would have chosen different actions, that involve more sqaush & stretch and exaggeration because I enjoy it more when I can do those things in my animation.

I could also make my lines heavier so that they show up on the scanner a bit better (but that's just getting petty)

Pantomime Sack Week 1

This time the post is at the right time. This week and next week we have to give the sack that we dropped earlier life and character, and maybe a purpose too!

I made my keys first and developed the timing for the animation, but as I have started animating it the keys have become almost redundent apart from using them for the poses and to maintain the size of the sack. They were still worth doing however.

The only thing I might want to change at the moment is the hold length for the anticipation before he lunges forward (making it shorter). Other than that I am pretty happy with the progress so far, although I have plenty to do.

Flag Wave Week 2

The (long) overdue post has arrived. Once you've done the flag rising up, making it fall down isn't too hard. I am pretty happy with the results; although the fast wave could do with more work to give it more definition and 3-Dimensionality.

Flag Wave Week 1

Lots of videos to show! I made, in total, 11 iterations, of this first part of the flag wave exercise. Everything had to be animated straight ahead, unlike the previous exercises. So far, I haven't had too much trouble. It's just been a process of constantly re-drawing, adding more drawings, and modifying drawings to perfect.

Here are 5 of the stages of my flag wave, very incomplete but a lot of time spent getting my head around it all.

As you can see I have been slowly improving it, and believe it or not there is still a couple of things that I could make better. It is the tube in the middle of the flag as it is raised for the second time. It feels unnatural, like it is being pulled back by something.

Other than that I am pretty happy with my work so far! :D

Sack Drop

An interesting challenge involving perspective, weight, anticipation, and a LOT of inbetweens. I started by animating the sack rotating at a constant speed. As the sack spins the corners rotate in a circular motion, but this is distorted by perspective to become an ellipse. The nearer the the rotation is to the horizon line the flatter the ellipse is. When plotting the the points of a constant speed along the ellipse, there will be more frames nearer the two edges because of perspective distortion.

After animating the sack at a constant rotation, I heavily modified the X-Sheet in Pencil Check to create a more natural rotating back and forth, slowing down. This builds up anticipation whilst keeping the movement natural.

I am pretty content with how this exercise turned out; however there are a few minor tweaks that could be made to improve it. The biggest one being that the tassles on the top of the back are very flat. They look like doritos attached by the corners and they don't feel like 3-Dimensional objects.

Bouncing Ball Exercise

Let's get this blog started!!

This was the first week properly animating, with (blue) pencil and paper. It's been hard and fun at the same time. I have created 3 different animations for balls of varying weight and motion. None of them were without problems, but I didn't find any serious fault or something tragically wrong. The purpose of these exercises was to learn and practice the 12 principles of animation, as well as getting a good 'feel' of animating weighted objects.

Beach Ball

The first  ball I animated was a beach ball. The key points to this kind of ball is that it is very light (in comparison to other types of balls), it doesn't squash and stretch much (if at all) and is not a perfect sphere - so it can wobble as it comes to a complete stop, finding its centre of gravity.

My only real trouble with the beach ball was that I had too many frames near the peak of each of bounce, so the ball floated in the air longer than it should have. I feel that the stop is a little to abrupt with the wobble and could use more unbetweens, but I left it alone to work on the other exercises.

Bowling Ball

My first attempt at the bowling ball had the weight but lacked any anticipation, it stopped too suddenly, and it fell too far from the edge of the cliff. I didn't think that it's trajectory was bad but after I redraw half of the animation and added a bunch more frames, to both ends, I can see why I was advised to change it.

This was also a little personal test to see if I could animate the spin of the ball. I found that it wasn't too hard, but I did get a bit sloppy and make a few mistakes when drawing the stop sequence, as it looked like it rotated on the spot. That was been removed and I am happy with the end result.

Football

Probably the harder one of the three. The football is flexible so it will squash and stretch but it also hard and fairly weighted so it loses momentum pretty quickly (depending on the surface it is in contact to). In this exercise I made the ball too squashy (it squashed and stretched on the second bounce, and a little on the third). I thought it looked fine but after I drew it more rounded (because I was advised to do so) it just gained more weight and solidarity. That made for a better animation. I also made the ball come to a stop too quickly, (seeing a pattern?) so I had to animate quite a few more frames in, maybe about 10-20.

To make the exercise even harder, we had to animate the football bouncing across 3 stages. This wasn't the problem. The problem came during the linetest when the animation was played back. I found that as the ball flew off of the right side of the stage, it looked as if it had teleported back to the left side of the stage. The way I solved this was by inserting blank frames between each stage: (5 for the first transition and 3 for the next). This gives the viewers enough time to catch up with what's happening and it looks as if the ball has entered another stage through one continous motion, as opposed to telporting back as it got to the edge of the stage.

Hope you learned something! :) If you haven't, just know that blue pencils are awesome!