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

Do the Wave

Day 7 SLIGHT UPDATE: to the quicktime movie

We started looking at wave action today. This is the behavior of a flexible material such as a flag blowing in the wind, loose clothing, long hair, etc. Based upon the example in the book, I did a quick pencil test using a hand snapping a horse whip. The animation can be described as an action travelling down the length of the material, perhaps "telegraphing" would be a good word. In this case, the action of the arm moves from the whip handle, travelling down the length of the whip strand until it snaps. I found a sound effect online and added it to the animation.

whip-sound.mov

A Walk With A Personality

Days 5 and 6

After completing our first walk cycle, we now have been assigned a walk with a certain characteristic. My animation needs to convey a "shy walk". Once again I did basically an 8-frame step. However, trying to get the timid emotion, I duplicated frames to slow things down a bit. For most frames, I did 4 shots each. For the inbetween standing still shots, I have 10 shots each of head down and head up. I chose not to move the arms attempting to portray a closed behavior.



I don't know if it portrays shyness or depression! Here are the results:

shy_walk_10Feb07-2.mov

shy_walk_11Feb07-1.mov

Walk that Walk

Day 3 and 4

The exercise this time around is a walking animation and looks like it will take several classes to complete. The requirements are to animate a simple figure walking across the screen. We are doing this on 8's, which means the figure must complete a step in 8 frames. And to walk across the screen, he must do a minimum of 5 steps.

Here are some early tests:

walk_test.mov
walk_test_on_4.mov

The way I did this was on one sheet of paper I planned out the walk.



Starting out with a series of 5 contact positions (where the forward foot is contacting the ground). The feet for two contact positions should overlap. with that done, I then focused on all the intermediate head positions. When walking the head moves in a wave shape with the head moving up and down between the high and low points. I then figure out the 8 body positions to go along with those 8 frames, along with the feet and arms. The arm positions are opposite of the foot positions (right foot fwd, left arm fwd, etc). I got a little crowded with the positions, so I moved to working each of the 8 positions on each sheet. These made up the first 8 frames. Using the plan sheet I continued with the 9th frame marking where the head should be, then using the first frame as a guide to trace off the rest of the body. I continued this for all of the rest of the frames. I did have to remember to slightly modify for the alternating arm/leg positions between each step to match which leg was the forward step.

In my final animation, it actually crosses the screen in 3 steps, but it seems to be enough to see the walk. He has a bit of the stretchy leg thing going on though...

Here's the "finished" product:

wesley_walkfinal2.mov

The Ubiquitous Bouncing Ball

Day 2

Today we worked on timing and spacing. These are key to creating good animation. Timing is the point at which a major event takes place. Spacing is the pacing of images to get to those major events. The ball bounce exercise is used to illustrate these key skills.

We started out with mapping out the bouncing ball. As a ball bounces gravity affects it. The ball loses energy and the arc becomes smaller and smaller. In this exercise, I had four bounces, the four impacts are considered the timing. The pacing of the frames between these bounces is the spacing. As a ball bounces, there are varying speeds at which the ball moves. Speeding up as it approaches ground and slowing down as it reaches the top of the arc.

The first arc has 20 frames before first bounce, second has 16 frames, third has 13 frames and final has 10 frames. Because we were given those guidelines for the arcs, it was somewhat difficult for me to get started. After fourth attempt, I figured out that the planning was the important part. So, between frame 1 and frame 20, the middle is frame 11. I had to map out the spacings for the first 10, and last 10, attempting to get spacing wider going towards ground and tighter as it approached top of arc.

Here's the finished product:

wesley_bounce2.mov

I don't like the result so much, but it did illustrate that timing and spacing are critical for getting believable action. Given that these exercises occur within a three hour time frame, I have to consider it fairly successful. With more practice and more time, I think I could get it to be smoother and more believable.

Basic Animation Class - morph

Ok, I'm jumping on the blogbus with everyone else... I started a basic animation class this week at Austin Community College and I thought I'd write about that...

Day 1

We did a morph animation. This involves taking two different objects and morphing the one into the other. And it works like this... We had a total of 12 frames to draw. The 1st frame is object one. The 12th frame is object two. These are the starting and ending frames. All frames inbetween are the various stages of object one slowly turning into object two. I used a bowling ball that turns into a bowling pin.


Bowling Ball (frame 1)


Bowling Pin (frame 12)

Ok, so before going through the morph process, I need to cover the supplies I used.
-You need a light table to see thru the stacked paper for doing your drawings. Of course you can get by in other ways...
-Pencil and paper obviously.
-A peg bar - this is a plastic strip that has some pegs that fit nicely into pre-punched holes in your paper. This allows for the paper to be stacked in a precise manner so your drawings line up. Again, you can get by without if you are careful about stacking and lining up your drawings, but can be a pain.
-A camera for capturing your shots to computer. A scanner could also be used...
-A program that allows you to capture and sequence your shots. I use iStopMotion on home computer and the class uses Adobe Premiere...

Step 1
Frame 1 and 12: Draw bowling ball and pin.

Step 2
Frame 7: Stack these and draw middle frame (7th frame). This drawing will be a guesstimate of a blend midway between the ball and pin.

Step 3
Frame 4: Stack frames 1 and frame 7 with new sheet. Draw blend between frame 1 and 7.

Step 4
Frames 2 and 3: Stack frames 1 and frame 4 with new sheet. Draw blend between frames 1 and 4, noting that this will not be exact middle but one-third of the way (frame 2). Then do another new sheet with same method but for two-thirds of the way.

Step 5
Frames 5 and 6: Stack frames 4 and frame 7 with new sheet. Draw blend between frames 4 and 7, noting again that this will not be exact middle but a third (frame 5). Repeat for frame 6.

Step 6
Frame 10: Stack frames 7 and frame 12, with new sheet. Draw blend between frames 7 and 12, noting not exact middle again.

Step 7
Frames 8 and 9: Stack frames 7 and 10, with new sheet. Draw frames 8 and 9, using methods above.

Step 8
Frame 11: Stack frames 10 and 12, with new sheet. Draw frame 11.

Ok, drawing portion is done. Now using the mounted camera I snapped photos of the drawings frame 1 thru 12. Frame 1 has 10 shots as a setup. Frames 2 thru 11 have 2 shots each. And frame 12 has 10 shots as a finish.

Here's a link to the "finished" movie. You'll need Quicktime to view it. FYI, you can view each of the frames in Quicktime by using the left and right arrow buttons to navigate frame by frame. (Ok, that doesn't work when embedded in web page... will work if saved to computer and viewed with QT).

wesley_morph2.mov