Animated By Me

Images

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

Overlapping action is the focus of this week's exercise. And let me tell you, this isn't as easy as it might look! As with anything that tries to mimic what's seen in the real world, if you don't get it right it looks really, really wrong.

Firstly, last week's assignment went down my mentor far better than the previous one! Thankfully it restored my confidence a bit, which was very welcome.

On to overlapping action, then. Well the concept is simple: not everything happens at the same time. The principle being applied has a load of different names and applications.

Think of someone running in a big coat. As they run the coat flaps out behind them. When they stop it billows forward and backward, eventually coming to rest.

This week they gave us a pendulum and said "here, animate this." OK, they gave us slightly more to work with, but not a whole heap.

The general gist is that the block at the top is the root, or driving force, and the pendulum is going to drag behind and take a long time to settle.

The only downside to this whole thing was that it's impossible to have it behave totally realistically, since a real settle with a real pendulum takes a boat load longer than can be achieved in the 200 frame limit (just over 8 seonds for everything.)

That aside, it was a lot of fun.