(Class 2) Week 6 Animation Mentor - Psychology of Body Mechanics

Hello Fellow Animators,

Ok so into week six we go! This week for me, was all about adding in more break down and turning things into spline. However I think I hit a snag this week, as I was having trouble figuring out the movement of the head, which you will see in the video :). So I tried doing something unique but it turns out it wasn't quite selling it with Dana. Basically when I have Stewie turn around to walk the other direction I have his head swing around, and because his head is so Big! It didn't look convincing or possible, and in many cases it looked like he would fall over easy.

The Second Dana mentioned was the head movement, they rotating up and down way too much, to the point where its not humanly possible, and I cam definitely see that once she mentioned it, man I wish I had eyes like that :). She mentions that the head yes should has no focus because he is drunk, but the problem was I made him too unfocused, and there should still be a hint of focus throughout the animation. So she showed us that there is actually a control switch you can turn on and off on the Stewie rig, that stops the head from rotating accordingly to the shoulder movements, kinda wish I knew about this earlier, but with mistakes we learn a lot :).

The third thing that Dana, mentioned was the way he got up from the bench, it was again not humanly possible to get up like that, it very strange when I first did it I thought it was fine, but now that Dana has mentioned it, it was so obvious! Again man I guess to see these things takes experience and understanding, again another lessons learnt, "If you can do it in the real world" chances are its not going to look convincing in the animated world no matter how cartoony.

So this week was pretty hardcore, I had a little too many mistakes that I will have to clean up for the next week. I have to say animation is not easy, and the joy of animating can be extremes! One minute the director will love where you are going, and you feel like you are on top of the world, the next minute you find out that is not there at all and you feel like your heart has been ripped out of your chest, I guess its part of it, and I think this course gets their student into that frame of mind before getting into the industry.

Cheers and see you next week,
Meng.

(Class 2) Week 5 Animation Mentor - Psychology of Body Mechanics

Hello Animators and Bloggers,

So week 5 is the beginning of a new animation, again we had to pick out from a list of things to animate, but this time around we have a new rig called Stewie, which is essentially Ballie with a body and head, no arms yet.

What I chose to do is a little bit of a challenge, and that is the drunkard stumble, according to Dana this is tricky because the character has no real control over the movement of the body, there is no real sense of direction or control, I guess that's pretty much what trying to walk while you are drunk is pretty much like :).

So I made a video reference of my self, and did some rough thumbnails out to animate what I want. This time I am taking bits and pieces from different takes, I really want to try doing that instead of directly taking it off on take, I think this is something I will be doing in the future if I was to be animating something I know I can't do in real life ( which is leaping over buildings and levitating, but I still try every now and the ;) ). Also I am trying to keep my thumbnails to story telling poses, I have a feeling thats what thumbnails are meant to be, and they should be done quickly, I personally think that adding breaks down only really make sense when you are blocking in Maya, but drawing them out first may make sense too.

So have a look and see me do silly things yet once again, I think someone at the park thought I was crazy, as if I am not already :).

Cheers,
Meng

(Class 2) Week 4 Animation Mentor - Psychology of Body Mechanics

Hello Animators of all kinds :),

So this is the last week for my first animation of Class 2, I think I got it smoothed out pretty well, but definitely learnt some important things along the way. I think the biggest thing was getting that timing down at the start, I had to re-adjust some of the timing, especially in the run phase, and I think my end results still had some timing flaws :(, my mentor felt the end part is like ballie jumped into water. But you learn from mistakes as everyone says, and for my next assignment, really going to try and nail the timing, I can see now why animators always say timing is the hardest thing to conquer, and its funny how things always need be faster then they are slower.

Here is my final finish work of the first assignment for Class 2. I have to admit I am definitely learning a lot about body mechanics in this class, I am still tyring to get my head around some things, however I get the feeling this is something that we learn more through experience and just doing a lot of animation with a lot of mistakes :P.

Cheers,
Meng

(Class 2) Week 3 Animation Mentor - Psychology of Body Mechanics

Hello again my fellow Animators and Animation fans :),

This week, we moved on to splining our animation from week 2's blocking phase, I got some awesome notes from my fellow AM students and some great notes from Dana. I think the biggest thing that I learnt from Dana, was understanding how energy works in the body and the things people do to disperse it or exhaust it in their animation. Since I am making Ballie (The character I am using to animate with), leap off the wall and land at such a high height, and I didn't compensate for all the downward force, energy when he landed, so the weight of the landing didn't feel right. At first I thought it felt OK in my blocking, but after Dana pointing it out, I could understand where she was coming from. She advised me to make the landing recovery a little bit more longer, because the body is trying to catch all that downward force and energy, and you can't do that in an instant.

So I made those changes and made ballie land with both feet eventually landing, instead of what I had before which was having ballie land on one feet and then leaping on that same feet. There was also other things mentioned in Dana's notes which was to avoid "molding" the feet together, so you have a clear silhouette every time, and audiences would not get confused with which feet is in front, this was something again I didn't take heed of in the past, and lesson well learnt.

The final thing I changed also, was the camera angle, at first I wanted a few more from behind ballie, but it turns out you can't get a good view of the push off, and Dana believes that was one of the key components in the animation, and is something you can't obscure from the audience.

So in the end this week I learnt quite a lot, its amazing how these small subtle things and do so much in just 10 seconds of animation, I will keep posting as much as I can, I know sometimes I tend to forget :P.

Cheers,
Meng

(Class 2) Week 2 Animation Mentor - Psychology of Body Mechanics

Hello Fellow Animators!

Ok so week two we started with our blocking, this time I was trying some new work flows that was introduced in the lectures, its definitely very interesting to see how a variety of people animate, and the most interesting was directly using splines when blocking, I can see how that can save time, and you will probably get a better sense of timing then say starting out in stepped, but I think in the mean time, because I am still learning I will keep with using the stepped method until I get a good solid hold on things.

I really understand now how 80% of the work in animation is pretty much in the blocking phase, getting the timing right and getting those key poses locked down, however I am finding that doing the breakdowns seems to be a little bit tricky, our Mentor Dana, suggested that we favour the previous key pose as a general rule of thumb, but if you wanted a ease in effect you would favour the next key pose, it all depended on what style you are going for.

Well I hope you like my blocking stage, and I think I got the timing right :), we'll see what happens once we go into spline!

Cheers,
Meng

(Class 2) Week 1 Animation Mentor - Psychology of Body Mechanics

My Fellow Bloggers!

Wow can't believe Class 2 has started :), I am really excited to start but at the same time a little scared and intimidated by the exercises, especially when looking at what some students from before did! They were the most amazing thing, and I wonder if I will be able to do them myself, but I must try.

So Class 2 began with the usual introduction, this time my mentor is Dana Boadway. Wow! She is amazing! A lot of experience around all the areas of animation, from commercial to full featured films, as well as performance experience too, I hope I get her again in the acting classes :).

But back to the task at hand, so for this week we had to plan the shots that we are going to do, I chose to do the "Jump 180 turn" animation, and thought I would do that by having my character push off a wall to turn himself around 180, you will see that in the video reference :), so this week you will find images of my planning and a video reference of myself doing the wall jump. I understand now why its important to take these references and do them yourself, just to get the feel of the movement, and going through the little sub conscience thought that comes to your mind when doing so.

Again I hope everyone enjoys the video reference if not you can at least laugh at my craziness :). It was a lot of fun doing the references, and boy! Do you get a lot of people staring at you when you are doing it :P.

Thanks again for popping by,
Meng

Week 12 Animation Mentor - Basic Foundation

Hello Fellow Bloggers!

So just to sum up the last week of Class 1 "Basic Foundation" of Animation mentor we had to put all the work we did for this class into one little short :). I thought this week was particularly good, because we get a little summary from our mentor of our weakness and strengths, and from the looks of things I need more work on my overlapping, yeah that was little tricky for me, but we learn from our mistakes I always say :).

Class was really awesome and I learnt so much, I think I have a really good solid foundation and looking forward to Class 2, and probably a little scared but will the best I can :). I hope you guys enjoy the composition of all the animation I did for class 2.

Cheers,
Meng