Animated By Me

Images

Here's the planning and images associated with this week's exercise:

So you think there's a lot of work in getting some sketches and a pose sorted and they go and throw an animation in there for good measure!

The exercise this week included a pose (with associated sketching sessions) and a bouncing ball, which had to have the appearance of a basketball (in terms of weight and timing, etc). The pose had to communicate 'excitement', which is a difficult thing to convey when your character has no face. It's also difficult to not do something too cliché. I failed on the latter, I know that. I know, I know, I know...

The other piece of work, which had me nearly in tears at times, was the basketball. It's so hard to do. There's a ton of things to think about. There's how much it rotates, how far it bounces, how high it bounces, how many times it bounces, how slow it is at the top of its bounces, how much it accelerates towards the ground.

You can understand, I'm sure, how difficult it is to keep a handle on these things. This is, of course, for a simple animation - I have no idea how I'm going to cope when I get to animating full characters. Mind you, by that point I should be much more experienced. I'm hoping so, at any rate!

In the process of creating these animations you watch your stuff over and over and over. And over. Then you start to be unable to work out if it's a bouncing ball any more or some weird blob on your screen. No kidding. Which is where one of the key benefits of Animation Mentor comes into play - other animation students and professionals.

They take a look at your work and go "oh this needs to change" or "that's just plain wrong", although they do it very nicely in most cases! Then you can come back at it fresh and fix any problems. The lesson there is to get something up there for people to see early doors!

Overall my mentor liked this piece of work, and had relatively few fixes / comments to make in the critique. Next stop, two bouncing balls!