Sack It To Me!

Flour Sack Exercise

For our final exercise, we are to animate a flour sack in action. It is to display volume and shifting weight. It took me several attempts at getting the timing down (well... as down as a white boy can get...)

flour-sack-home.mov

I added some shading this time around. Unfortunately, I didn't quite frame the shots well and the sack goes out of frame at the top of his arcing movement. Perhaps, I'll reshoot tomorrow... 'After all, tomorrow is another day...'

Pull My Finger... huh-huh...

Pull Exercise

In this exercise we were to animate a push or pull action. Like other exercises, it is supposed to illustrate some physical forces at work. In this case, it is the tension of two bodies pulling in opposite directions.

Since I'm slow at 'me drawrings', I have a guy playing tug-o-war with someone/something off-stage. Then, soo-prise, soo-prise, soo-prise... something happens.

pull-it.mov

Extra Credit (not)

Hand Exercises

A couple of quick stop-motion exercises using a sculpture hand modelling tool...

hand-exercise1.mov
hand-exercise2-fast.mov
handtest2-web.mov

You Just Need A Little Lift...

Day Whatever...

This exercise is to illustrate lifting a heavy object. We had to animate the following parameters:

-consider the object
-struggle lifting the object
-weight of the object, and
-some surprise ending

lift-final-home-web1.mov
lift-home-final.mov (deflicker settings)

Day 14 & 15

Ok, this week we did no animation. Instead we focused on viewing animation clips. We watched some of the early Disney shorts, like Steamboat Willie, as well as full-length features like Snow White. The intent was to note the difference in quality of animation. The progression from the rougher early Disney to the more refined full-length features. The early animations had little to no ease-ins and all objects in frame moved at generally the same speed. The later animations were more refined with different objects moving with their own timing and spacing. The full-length features had even further refinements with multiple things going on at the same time and more realistic or at least believable action.

We also watched a couple of episodes of the Flintstones (an early one then a later one). Animation for television is on a much tighter time schedule. There are more looping shots and reused animations. Some action is implied rather than actually animated, using soundtrack to illustrate an action.

For spring break, I did little but I did manage to doodle a quick fire animation using color and sound effect pulled off of the web:

fire-color-sound.mov

You Make Heads Turn...

Day 12 & 13

Now for a head turn exercise.

First, we did a 10 frame head turn with no details. We did this simple run to check our turn action. It needed to be abrupt and overdramatic to enable the hair swing. Next, we added facial features to the same 10 frames. And finally, with hair in secondary action animation. I had a little fun and added Rocky Horror Picture Show's Time Warp, since my dude looks kinda like Riff-Raff. We needed the long hair in order to have the secondary action. I went with the bald on top to keep it simple. Then he ended up doing the Time Warp. I still have the final frames to do to finish the hair settling to a standstill at the end.

hair-time_warp.mov

And the final version:

riff-raff-final.mov

Arm-y Attack

Day 10 & 11

This exercise is to capture the arm in action. The intent is to capture a fluid-like motion of the entire arm doing some activity. We had recently watched the classic French film Delicatessen, so I was inspired to do cleaver chop and throw...

chop-n-throw-final.mov

Do the Wave

Day 8 (cont'd)

One last wave. This one is like a flag waving in the breeze. You'll have to imagine the rest of the flag...

wave2.mov

Do the Wave

Day 8

Wave action, part deus. I don't care for this one much. It looked better in the planning. Perhaps it would be better with more arcing in the S-curves...

wave.mov