Sunday, November 27, 2011

Natural/Neutral Walk Cycle: The Pink Panther

As an precessor to animating attitude walks and acting, we had to create an indtroductionary natural (read: neutral/no fun) walk cycle. We were working with the Pink Panther for this assignment and I went for an older design of him which is the reason for his head being pretty big and his tail being pretty short.


I Appologize for the vague image quality. The images have been through some quality-reducing processing in order to keep the walk cycle looping. Though The Animation Workshop provides us with a lot of great tools, sometimes, it just doesn't quite suffice.

Friday, November 18, 2011

Animation Inbetweening Pt. 2 - Stitch and Fruit

The second installment of our course in animation inbetweening did not really focus all that much on inbetweening. The assigment we were given was to take our scenes of Stitch made during the Drawing for Animation course and draw the missing inbetweens. Personally, my animation was very (read: all too) rough. With no clear single lines to inbetween, I had to more or less clean up my animation before being able to inbetween it (which I believe is also the order of the work process out in the industry, truth be told). Fortunatly, this meant that I was given a chance to go over the animation itself aswell, making pretty much everything better. Here's a linetest of the result:


For a comparison to the old rough version, here's a link to that blog post.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Animation Inbetweening Pt. 1 - The Secret of Kells, Aisling Scene

This week, we've practiced animation inbetweening. We were given the Aisling scene from the movie "The Secret of Kells". The timing had been changed so we couldn't copy off the movie, and fortunatly the new timing looks so much better than the weird snappy timing that ended up in the actual movie.

This is the scene as it was handed to us, with filled-in blanks each time an inbetween drawing was to be made:


...And this is the scene complete with all the 27 inbetweens I did, including the new timing. Note: The mouths have been left out, as this was strictly an assignment in inbetweening, not lipsync:


Next week, we're going to inbetween our scenes of Stitch getting a fruit from a tree.

Friday, November 4, 2011

Design 1

This week, I had my first design class ever. Lawrence Marvit was our teacher, and it has truly been an epiphany. I went from seeing abstract art as nonsense to seeing it as the most clear way of expressing a feeling. We stacked drawing tools (first Line then Shape then Value etc...) and worked on an abstract level the whole week, even though most of the pictures we analysed were classical paintings of figures and landscapes. We spend hours upon hours of creating a picture with three black boxes and a line, drew the taste of bacon and dark chocolate, drew the sound of "Kind of Blue", and the feelings of romance and Robin Hood. Here are some of my drawings; believe it or not, to do them took between 3 hours and 20 minutes in excecution as well as days of studying:

Kind of Blue
"A smoky underground jazz club"

Romance
"Two people under bed sheets"

Robin Hood
"A bird soaring over a big wall"