Once again the first week was blocking the shot in (as well as putting Stu in an ‘exhausted’ pose) and the second week was cleaning up (along with a ‘balance’ pose for Stu).

Blocking went fine, as usual, although there was a bit missing from it, according to my mentor; namely a weight shift to the front foot. I ended up putting that in before going on to do the clean up.

This was the first time I was able to video myself and use that as reference. It turns out I can’t do the Ministry of Silly Walks walk. Who knew?

Still it was good enough for me to get some good timing out of my animation and make the most of the assignment, so I’ll be using video reference a lot going forward!

I don’t know how this assignment will go down with my mentor, but I’m pleased with how it turned out. It is a silly walk. I also learnt a lot in the lecture, which was by a great guy called Victor Navone. He works for Pixar and the lecture was on how to tidy up from blocking, which was ideal since I suck at that.

Well that concludes Class 1 for me. Next week we hit Class 2 - the Psychology of Body Mechanics. Technical sounding, ain’t it?

Well this assignment was a two-weeker; the first week you block out the shot, the second you refine, polish and finalise. Blocking a shot is where you lay out the key frames and the breakdown frames between them. Essentially you could think of it as a means of showing what’s going on in the shot with the minimum of information. So there’s no smooth animation, it’s all pose-to-pose. Well since that’s not as much fun for you I’ve bundled it with the second week where it’s all cleaned up and tidy. I say that, but I didn’t do such a great job of tidying. More on that in a second.

This particular assignment is called the Vanilla Walk Cycle. A walk cycle is where you have a character take a couple of steps, but you could loop the animation over and over and there’d be seamless animation of the character walking. Walk… Cycle… OK.

Vanilla in this case just means there’s nothing there that implies character. No two walks are the same, for sure, so the term doesn’t mean the walk isn’t unique, but it does mean that there’s nothing overtly personalised.

The blocking went well - I felt I got a pretty good handle on things. Then I started to tidy it up in week 9 and talk about a learning curve. It took me a very long time (up to 3am on a Saturday night at one stage if memory serves) and it still felt pretty ropey in the end. As it happened my mentor agreed, which only served to depress me further.

Also in these assignments were two poses with Stu: Strength (Week 8) and Concerned (Week 9). The strength pose was significantly better and, I suspect, benefited from the fact that I was doing it alongside the blocking rather than trying to do it with the clean-up. These two weeks gave me a lot to learn. Mainly I learnt about how the position and rotation of the hips and feet totally control the position of the knees and that sometimes you just have to delete the whole flaming thing and start again!

I have to hand it to the folks at Animation Mentor, they really know how to plan a syllabus. I was saying to someone today that it’s an exceptionally well put together one, as it builds week on week. You end up looking back at your earlier stuff after just a few weeks and it’s like ‘wow, I could do that so much better if I did it again!’ That’s progress, I guess.

This week, then, in the spirit of building on the last few exercises, is to put a little Tailor through his paces. The only guidance we were given in terms of the assignment is that there must be at least three bounces in there. Of course one has to bear in mind that this is essentially like the bouncing ball but with two exceptions: it’s not dead, so it ‘chooses’ where’s it going and it’s got a tail which it either takes for a ride or which it uses to achieve something. Nifty.

I decided I wanted to have a combination of self-propelled jumps and a ‘forced’ jump, i.e. one with a springboard. I bobbed over to the obstacle course Maya file, got a hold of the springboard and then popped it into my quick’n'durty polygonal landscape. Bing! Tailor’s Obstacle Course!

Other things to note in this exercise is that there’s some overlap and drag with his tail, which is quite tricky to do. Essentially the force of the jump forces the root of the tail, and that force makes its way down the ‘chain’ of the tail. The net result of this is that the tail will follow the same path as the body, albeit slightly offset. There’s times in my animation where this isn’t the case, however this is typically where a force has affected the tail pretty harshly (like when he lands on the ground and so on.)

As always it’s hard to tell at this stage just how successful it’s been since I’m too close to the animation. However, I’m pleased with how it came out and I don’t think I’d change much… which isn’t to say others wouldn’t!

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.

Last week’s assignment didn’t go down very well with my mentor. He said the physics was off in my shot with which, I have to say, I didn’t totally agree. He’s a professional animator and therefore he knows what reads, so there’s something in there for me to take away and, having watched it again, he does have a point.

In our lecture this week we covered squash & stretch and anticipation. Anticipation comes before any action and is responsible for two things: 1) preparing the audience for the impending action and 2) allowing the character to build up the requisite force for the action.

Think about a person jumping. They squat down before they jump. That’s the anticipation; they are building up the force in their muscles and if you’re watching them you know they are about to jump.

OK, so that’s anticipation. Let’s talk about squash & stretch.

Anything organic will squash and stretch during an action. In an extreme example you could think about a water balloon hitting the table (and let’s assume it doesn’t explode!) and how it sags. And when you pick it up at one end it stretches out.

Well when someone is going about their actions there’s all sorts of squash and stretch going on, whether it’s an individual part of the body (say the face when someone scruntches it up) or the body as a whole (squatting for the aforementioned jump.)

Taking all that into account we have our infamous ball taking on the challenge of an obstacle course. The ball has to get its initial jump energy from somewhere, and that’s why you’ll see it squat down a bit. From there it has to act like a normal ball, so everything is toned down.

The other part of this week’s assignment has to have Stu, our large-headed chum, take the pose of devastation. You can have yourself a look at that by clicking on the picture above.

I hope you enjoy this week’s work. If I’m honest, I really hope my mentor does this time, too!

So last week’s exercise was all about getting a ball of middle-ish weight, say a basketball or football, to bounce and come to rest. There was a lot to learn about getting that to work. If you’re interested in that exercise and haven’t read about it then you should take a look.

What was different this week was that there was a) no pose to do and b) there were two balls to animate. The balls needed to be extremes - a beach ball and a cannon ball, for example. Timing and spacing are the ‘techniques’, for want of a better term, that allow the animator to show the difference in these two balls in terms of weight and material.

To understand it you need to think in terms of a ball at two points in time. The ball will be at different positions at those two points in time. These moments in time are called Key Frames or Key Poses, depending on what you’re doing, who you are and probably the mood you’re in.

Timing and spacing apply to these Key Frames and all the frames between. Timing is how quickly or slowly something happens… in this example you could argue it’s how often the balls bounce. So the beach ball will be quite floaty and slow in its bounce compared to the cannon ball, which will be heavy and will slam down.

Spacing is where the ball is between two Key Frames. It’s not the easiest thing to explain academically or without pictures, but the idea is that between two Key Frames there are other frames which, when played back to back, convince the eye that there’s some motion going on.

Well the ball could be evenly spaced between the Key Frames, but that would give it a robotic feel, like some kind of regular motor is controlling the ball and moving it a fixed amount each frame. Conversely the ball is moving faster when it’s nearer the ground (because it’s accelerating towards it) - so effectively between two frames you’re going to see more movement. At the top of a bounce arc it’s lost all its energy and is about to head back down again. The distance covered between two frames in this instance is a lot less.

I hope that explains it a little bit; if that’s all too much for you, just watch the video!

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!

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!