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.

Drawings 1

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.