#knb 122

Ugh, Rotoscoping. Not my favourite animation technique, but here we are. At least it’s not 3D?

I enjoyed doing the beginning and ending gesture sequence -- it was fun keeping the human form under those abstract lines and seeing how they entered the scene, but the structural bit was a bit of a slog (and the shading a non-starter - on figures this small it just ends up looking muddy and cluttered) and honestly, I think I would have preferred animating our little scene from scratch instead of just endless tracing over 144 frames. Even exaggerating and tweaking, it’s a lot harder to get rotoscoping to look like it has weight instead of being all...floaty... and I definitely erred on the side of floaty here. 

There’s not really much else to say -- maybe I could have made the second gesture bit more gestural, and maybe I could have tweaked the timing just a little bit more (though that probably would have involved deleting frames and doing a lot more off-frame work than we probably would have been allowed) 

So, given the sheer amount of attempt gifs and planning pictures up there, it’s kind of obvious that this one did not so so smoothly. I don’t know, I can animate something ridiculous like a person swinging a staff but can I do a bog standard weight lift?

Well, after a fashion as it turns out. Af first I thought the problem was just plain timing, and to a point it was (the first attempt is, as you see moving waay too fast let despite having a good 36 frames in here) but no matter how I tried, nor how many extra frames I jammed in there, or shifted around or redrew.

There comes a point where you just stop trying and start again. So, attempt two!

Already it’s obviously much better, there’s a definite weight in the initial lift. Alas though, it quickly loses weight and turns into a bit of a balloon on the lift. There’s also the small matter of that rather sharp right angle arc where the character rocks back with the weight, taking it into his lap and then shooting right up, and we’re not even going to talk about what the hell went wrong with the top arm there. 

So what’s a girl to do? restart again obviously. This time I kept the old timing and focused more on the posing, and there I found at least some of my problems - I could have tweaked the timing all I liked, but without the poses looking like the character was hefting a significant weight, I wasn’t going to go anywhere. 

After that it started to come together fairly quickly - I extended it out to 36 frames instead of 24 to slow it down and I think it helped a lot. I could probably add a few more frames, and a bit more force put into the ‘lift’ segment, but on the whole I’m pretty happy with what I came up with in the end.

https://youtu.be/-LCsJQqMylwIs it me or are all those turning heads up there kind of ... motion sickness inducing?

(Probably not the best statement to lead with in an animation assignment blog, but ah, here we are)

So, the head turn! Honestly I usually go in with the cutesy cartoon dot-fer-eyes face for these kinds of things because, boring and also, lazy, but this time I thought I’d go for an actual proper face to see what I could do. 

Turns out, something pretty damn cool! I planned out the actual head turn bit, easing in and out on the ends, and going fast in the middle, but then decided to go with the flow with the expression there. I animated the basic (and kind of horrifying - i’m sad I didn’t save a gif of it at that stage!) blocky triangle for nose and creepy circles for eyes straight ahead and then went back over and added a proper, only semi cartooned face over the top. I figured you couldn’t do one of these things without a blink in the middle, so I added that, and I’m really happy with how it turned out there. I probably could have pushed out the smile at the end a little, but I think it’s pretty cute as is.

And hey, because I actually had a little time to spare to play around, I even added a tiny bit of shading in there to try and show the planes of the face. I don’t think it’s perfect, not by a long shot, but I kind of like the extra dimensionality it gives.

Today we had Patrick for the life drawing tut. We started off with 5 two minute gestural sketches of poses by Saara. Then Patrick gave us some examples and tips, followed by a further 5 two minute poses. The second round of sketches were more focused on solely capturing the gesture, which will be important for the final assessment task.

Okay, you see all that talk in the post about the walk cycle? Yeah pretty much apply it to this one too. I originally had the character with her arms up behind her head like she was running away from something (and frankly this is me so it was probably a bear - one day I really will get around to animating that) but I couldn’t get the hands to stop jumping, so normal arms it was.

The back leaning slope of the torso was left though to show where I was originally going with this. I still really like the way the one without arms is running - there’s something kind of comical there, and I should probably go back and redraw it to have a character with their arms stuck inside a jumper or something for sheer ridiculous effect. (hey, having a jumper’s arms flap around all noodly sounds like something fun to work on. Shame it’s a bit late to be having that kind of excellent idea!)

With the arms however the speed of the run just didn’t work, and so I took it up to 24 frames and popped the keys on twos again, slowing it down to a pleasant jog rate. At least now you can see what’s going on, and it lessens the terminator effect going on there.

Reference and Inspiration and all other things to do with Drawing and Animation found so far this semester.

Flour Sack/Sugar Bag Reference/Inspiration and Animation/LoA Reference