Animation Intensive Video 03: Sid

This one was a subtle facial-gesture animation exercise. I am happy with the beginning, but it all goes a bit pear-shaped in the end.

Animation Intensive Video 02: Baby, Adult, Geriatric

For my Animation Intensive class I'm taking this semester, our second assessment piece was the Sphinx's Riddle, with a child, adult, and geriatric animation required. The standard was very rough, with mostly keys and breakdowns, though I know I missed a lot of breakdowns on the adult video. Also the volumes on the old man are terrible.

Baby


Adult


Geriatric

Animation Intensive Video 01: Longjump

For our Animation Intensive class this semester, we have to hand in weekly animations (usually only rough keys and breakdowns) and the first one was an athletic performance.

I did the long jump.


Volume consistency? What volume consistency?

Where Have I Been?

I've recently started university again in Brisbane after a semester abroad at San Jose State University, California.

It was an amazing education experience and I learned so much both from my teachers and the other students in the degree there, who are all passionate and committed and just awesome people. I also received a huge amount of professional advice from both guest lecturers who visited the school and the lecturers who had a wealth of industry experience which they loved to share (that guy not jumping on the left? Taught me storybarding and is now an art director at ILM, San Francisco). The honest, respectful and passionate atmosphere of the classes was a top-down philosophy which the SJSU animation community encouraged at all levels of the program.

I also traveled around the US and Canada a bit at the end of my time there, and spent most of my time in museums and art galleries expanding my art experience and knowledge at places like The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which contain the originals of works of art I love but until recently I had only seen digital or printed copies of.

So, despite missing all my friends in California (and the other places of North America I visited) I'm starting this semester feeling settled and confident in my direction this year, and hopefully will be able to maintain it until I finish up at the end of it all. Whatever happens, I will probably be back next year doing honours, since I know if I want to compete with international graduates, I will need at least 4 years at university for any kind of art-related career field overseas.

Fire It Up!

Pull it apart just to see how it fits together...

I've been looking at the work of some skilled Flash artists lately like Adam Phillips to try and get an idea of how I'm going to approach my final animation without resorting to selling what little of my soul I have left to the Demon Gods of Tweening.

And then I found this by Sabrina Cotugno.

Pretty sweet. I like the style of lineless animation and the colour coherency overall, but I also love the way this just doesn't look like your average Flash animation. So I sat down tonight to analyse it and figure out what she did to get it the way it looks.

And this is what I came up with:
1. 99% of character animation shot on 3s. Some on 2s. Almost none on 1s. If I was to apply this to my 30 second film, even if I animated every 3rd frame (which I'm not - I'll be hand-animating a lot less than that) I'd still only have 250 frames to draw. Sounds manageable.
2. Said characters look mostly redrawn for major actions, but are probably compiled into symbol libraries on every redraw, because there's also a lot of symbol re-use, but not in horribly obvious ways. A bit of a slight movement here and there but nothing major like the kinds of things you see on the ABC in the afternoons.
3. Lineless shapes ftw. Makes the tiny shape tweens she has on things like hair-bits bouncing and stuff look much less crap and more like real shapes in animation.
4. All the backgrounds look like they're PS layers turned into bitmap symbols. I'd say she used alpha tweens on the layers to get the fade-in glow at the beginning on the trees and leaves and so on.
5. Backgrounds and effects are done on 1s, but she's avoided problems with sliding by putting foreground objects in the way of the feet when they're walking along the ground plane, so it just gives the effect of a slight shift on the camera angle as it pans with the movement.
6. Obviously she's made animation her bitch and so the lines of action are still all perfect and everything's on-model with the redraws and so on. I wouldn't be surprised if she did pencil tests for all the major character animation before redrawing over it in Flash.

Even if I use none of the above techniques in my film for this semester, it's something to think about for third year anyway. You can probably do all the same stuff in Toon Boom as well.

Flash animatic

Last assignment was to do a Flash animatic, with all the god-awful pain that comes with tweening and nesting of symbols. I managed it in the end, but I'd rather have teeth pulled than have to deal with that kind of tediousness in a three-week project again. Sure, whatever, redraw the frames the traditional way in the program, just don't ask me to even begin to think about Flash's jerky background-motion functions.

Here's the fruits of the labour.






And here's the final animatic.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm now going to go gouge my eyes out with a spoon.

Experimental Animation Done Right

Awesome.