AM Quarter 2 Assignment 2 Polish and Assignment 3 planning

This week was a lot of work, I should have taken my blocking into splines last week, however, I wanted Chad's opinion on what I had before I did. Had I splined out my animation last week I would have found I had not blocked it very well for splining, because I had changed the poses in the spine in inconstant ways. So I had to delete the whole spine and redo it. It took me a long time to commit to deleting the spine, but in the end I think it was the only way to go. I was much happier with my blocking then I am with the final product. I lost some of my holds that I really liked and the timing changed too into something that just wasn't as punchy. I mainly focused on trying to have nice arcs and smooth animation. I hope chad has some good feed back on how I can work the animation and make it punchier. I learned a lot from this one that I feel will help me a lot in the next assignment.

I originally wanted to do hop on one leg and fall down. But I felt it would end up being too similar to my last one. Plus I had some trouble when it came to splining this one so I wanted something straightforward. So I decided to do a back flip off a box (yes for some reason I feel a backflip is easier then a fall) so I went to Youtube and looked for back flips off a building. I combined 2 videos for my reference, for some reason, all the really good back flip videos cut out the part where the guy anticipates the jump off the building.

From The video I made some planning sketches. In the end I may need some more, but this time I am going to try and keep my blocking less detailed and watch the splines.
I broke those down into the individual Keys and breakdowns.

I feel pretty confident in my ability to pull this off. Going to try and get a lot of blocking done next week so that I am able to spend more time cleaning up the animation.

AM Quarter 2 Assignment 2 blocking02

This week I had a substitute mentor, because Chad was on vacation after wrapping up the movie he was working on. The sub I had was Jay Davis who was amazing, he worked for Disney for a while and now he has decided to pursue painting. He is a Erotic Surrealist, and his paintings are spectacular, I really enjoy them. He was a great mentor to have this week because laughed at my animation which was awesome, usually them mentors are so stoned faced it was nice to get a reaction out of him. He also had alot of great insight into my scene about having some texture to the animation, meaning having actions with different speeds and intensities happening in the same shot. I feel I ended up with a much stronger piece because of it and I know next assignment that I will be thinking more about texture and timing. Though because I needed to change so much I didn't feel confident in taking it out of stepped mode before turning it in. Though I have so many keys and break downs it shouldn't be that intense to spline it out.

Animation Mentor Q2 ASN Drunk Stumble Blocking01

After getting some great notes from my mentor Chad Sellers, I changed some of my actions to meet his notes. Which lead to a better more entertaining animation, feel. I went with the pose to pose blocking on 1s and then spaced them out. The only problem I had was that I made a lot of keys which made it so I had not alot of wiggle room when it came to timing.

I posted this on my public review and showed it to Laura. I didn't get much response from the public review. Laura told me that the big step towards the end wasn't working for her, it took 50 frames to do it and I was unsure about the movement so I got rid of it. This solved alot of my timing problems and gave me the extra frames that I needed to pad the changes in direction.

I looked at my planning critique from last week again and I got a couple of new ideas but they are all long the same lines of what I already have, so I will save those for next week if what I have going this week isn't working. I exaggerated every movement with the knowledge that I could tone it down later. I look forward to getting my critique next week.

AM Quarter 2 Assignment 1 Polish and Assignment 2 planning

This was the last week for assignment number 1, this week I turned in my polished version of my animation. It is really smooth and i'm pretty happy with it. I'm sure when a more seasoned eye sees it there will be some errors that I can tweak but for myself I am really happy with how clean it is. Never got it this clean at Ai.

I also started assignment number 2. I chose to do a drunken stumble, because i thought researching this part would be alot of fun. I'm always amazed at how difficult it is to get get drunk when your plan is to get drunk but not sick. Needless to say I was unable to get drunk enough to do a proper drunken stumble, but I think my acting skills make up for that.

From the reference I created my planning drawings. I only did the main keys, except for the last line they are broken down a little more. But last time I did this I found more inbetweens when I was working on the blocking. So i figured that should all work out well.I wasn't really sure what to do with the second page. I did the same thing that I did last time where I layer all of the poses on top of each other and it turned out looking really clutter and made me feel like it was missing something.

AM Quarter 2 Assignment 1 Re-Blocking

Refining and revising my animation. Big shout out to Ted this week who continued to lend me his eye and give me insights. It still needs to be tweaked and refined, but I feel it is at a good point to turn it in this week - the final animation isn't due until next week.

AM Quarter 2 Assignment 1 Blocking

The lecture this week was done by Dimos Vrysellas, an animator who approaches 3D animation like it was 2D and called all the key poses "drawings." He also didn't time his keys but just did them one after another until he had them all down.This is a good way to do it with pose theory where one pose needs to flow into another. It helped me to simply focus on the poses and not really worry about the timing yet. I found this method worked really well for me and it also helped me to realize where I needed more breakdowns before I started with the timing. It also lead to cleaner poses. I then spaced out all the key frames by 4 and played that. The timing wasn't correct but I just changed some things to be faster and other things to be slower until it felt right. This method worked really well for me and I hope it leads to simpler clean up and better animation as I progress.

AM Quarter 2 Assignment 1

Ref Yay quarter 2 has started! I'm in Psychology of Body Mechanics and my mentor is an animator named Chad Seller who works at Disney Animation studios right now.
The first assignment for this quarter was to pick an action from a list, there were about 10 of them varying in difficulty. Students were supposed to turn the actions into an animation and work on it progressively for the next 4 weeks. I chose to do jumping over a gap. When I was reading the list the first thing that popped in my head was the scene in "Up" where young Mr.Fredrickson jumps over a small gap in the sidewalk.

The best way to figure out how to do the jump is to do it myself and film it. Reference footage helps for noticing small things that one wouldn't think about as well as provide me with real body mechanics to refer to.

Planning sketch 01
The assignment didn't have any limitations beyond the motion. Though after watching the lecture I decided to give myself the limitation of 120 frames and to try and make the character look proud while he is doing this action. I decided to do this with some cocky hip gestures.
Planning sketch 02
This is the break down of the motion, all the key poses with notes going along with it to explain how the motion works. I didn't add any real frame notations on these notes. I feel that that should be a much more organic process and something I have to see and feel right now. One day I hope I can look at an action and just know the timing.

The next step and the next assignment is to block this motion out - so stayed tuned.