Learning Animation

12/51 - Falling Flour Sack - Level 2! - May 28

Hooray! I made it to level 2 in only 2 years!

I was more excited to try this challenge. Thought about it on my commute, sketched at lunch, and then spent 4 days erasing and reworking the frames. I grew up watching Tom&Jerry on long long road trips, so it's something I want to be capable of.

I did get side-tracked by Tom&Jerry. Turns out the animations started in the 1930s as theatrical releases. That is why the 4th of July episode has awards in the intro. There was more effort and time going into these shows compared to many today. Saying "They don't make them like they used to" isn't quite as simple.

11/51 - Falling Flour Sack - May 11

10/51 - Falling Flour Sack - May 10

I've been trying to work on the 51 animations again（good lord has it been 2 years?）and struggling horribly with the flour sack. I get the point of the exercise, but I've never even seen a sack of flour...

So I decided to take a sketch and animate that. And a 3 sec unplanned animation turned to 8. Adding in Ideas i thought about while driving, modifying bits, just having fun. I'm more than glad to see that I can just animate a character before going through every exercise on that long list. I want to try this more.

Tango of the Tarpon

What if From the Depths had an old TV show?!

I have no Idea what I am doing! But it's fun!

9/51 - Flour Sack jumping

Oh my, its been a year since I did the waving example.

I realized this weekend that I was sketching a person's motion step by step... instead of animating. So I tried to make some appealing shapes for 2 keys, then had ideas to give character.

The animation looked terrible and I had to take a break to figure out what was wrong. Turns out timing had a LOT to do with it. I could have improved this by planning out the jumping motion and adding breakdowns that contact the ground.

Looking for this example afterward, it seems like most people have the sack jumping over a chasm. I did find that Nick.In.Motion had a very clean looking hop that I need to study closer!

8/51 - Flour Sack waving (loop)

I held onto this for a few days. The animation is fine enough, but I don't know what a flour sack looks like.

First real try at 3D animation. I think referencing some video would help here as well. Did not play with the curves which contributes to the oddly smooth look.

7/51 - Character thinking [tougher than it sounds]

Just a rough for this one as well. Filming myself would have helped a lot. I found several animations with clear expressions so, I wanted to try a character with no face. That, took quite a bit of planning to figure out, and structure suffered for the motion. Not a terrible trade off at this stage I think.

6/51

The idea of cleaning every animation put me off for far too long. More can be done in less time with rougher work. I know I can clean and add effects, but for now I need to focus on the motion.

Blinking tutorial

4/51 & 5/51

Got a little ahead of myself and tried to use an existing character

First part shows the head turn, but every video I saw (including the animator island video this exercise comes from) put a lot of emphasis on the anticipation and overshoot. The line weights and colors are not right, the face isn't quite the right shape, and the motions isn't great.

3/51

I might have gotten a little desperate to get this to look right...

Blocking out the distance the brick should actually fall helps a lot, but the brick does not fall strait down. It accelerates off the edge first. Animating strait-through for the tipping and bouncing part worked very well. Adding the first brick drawing as a reference for the rest was essential as the volume kept morphing.

Next time I should work looser.

Reference of, of a brick falling.

2/51 - Ball Bouncing across the screen

I wanted to try this exercise in perspective. Drawing from corner to corner on the chart ensures the halfway point is correct in the perspective. Had to restart after I used equal divisions.

This time I tried "inbetweening" in the color phase. I was more than surprised by how the look of the animation changed.

I am unsure how to feel about halving the distance between frames for the vertical motion.

1/51 - Ball bouncing in place

I've said I'd learn to animate before. I've done this exercise 5 times in years past, but never put much effort into it or progressed further. Why not put everything into it now?

51 great animation exercises: A structure to study by.

Dong Chang-Quick Start Guide: Opentoonz is free, used by Ghibli.