Class 1 - Week 2
Animated on 17th January 2009
Images
Here's the planning and images associated with this week's exercise:
Week 2, then! Week 1, incidentally, had no real coursework attached - it was mainly about getting around campus and introducing yourself to people. Done that, let's start this course!
Great animation starts with great poses. Great poses start with great planning. So great animation starts with great planning. Planning is key because it lets you get your ideas down onto paper very quickly. Much more quickly than you can get a CG character (like Stu above) posed. Only once you know where you're going do you fire up the computer and start using the tools.
In order to do good planning you have to get out there and start observing the world around you. Looking at how people behave, how they move, why they move the way they do and what makes their movement unique to them.
Big things to get your head around. Even bigger when you consider this week's assignment was to sketch people going about doing their daily tasks. So you have about 5 seconds to take it all in and then about 30 seconds to get it drawn.
Right, but if you look at my 'sketches' you'll see they're a bit too well-formed for 30-second drawings. Yeah. I didn't really get that part of it, and my mentor took issue with it straight away. They want to see loose drawings; drawings that catch the essence of the action. Not an "engineer's drawing" as my mentor called it. Fair enough, lesson learnt.
After we'd got some sketches down we needed to recreate the pose with Stu, a rather large-headed bi-ped character. That was really excellent fun to do because it allowed me to start playing with the controls and to push my characters pose a little bit.
So observation » planning » poses » animation. Got it. Next!