Animation Basics 2: Ball With Attitude and Tail

This Monday, class started out with each student pulling a piece of paper out of a bag. On the paper was written an emotion; "sad", "happy", "angry"; I pulled "angry". Now, the assignment was to use the following 3 days on creating an animation of a ball with a tail, expressing the aforementioned emotion. But the assignment had very specific requirements: the clip had to be exactly 7 seconds (175 frames) long, where exactly the first 5 seconds were to be made up of movement and the last 2 seconds should show a held position (in my case, a pitch black screen - just to fool everybody).

Animation Basics 1: Heavy And Light Ball

Animation finally started, and as almost everybody in the class are new to the craft, we started off with the basics. This was an exercise in showing the difference between a light (ping-pong) and a heavy (bowling) ball. Both animations were required to be seen from the side, but I mixed it up for the heavy ball - just to show off ;-)

Gerald McBoing-Boing

Drawing somebody else's character design a million times is often a necessity in animation. This is tedious work but the key to get through it is to be creative with it and to try to have fun while drawing a design you may think is stupid. I've been drawing Gerald McBoing-Boing all day. Here's a few sketches.

"Money Does Grow On Trees"

This is the final ("final" so far, as always) product of my first film collaboration, made at The Animation Workshop, so It's not my movie all alone (well, the scenes in the post below are); it's a result of combined work effort and ideas between Mathias Hald Nørgaard, Karina Venneberg and Elisabeth Hau.

A Few Shots from "Money Does Grow On Trees"

Last week, I began studying Character Animation at The Animation Workshop. Truth be told, the specifically animation minded teachings have not begun just yet, but I am learning about a lot of the basics in movie making and production as well as getting to know and work with some of my fellow students/collegues.
Our very first project was an exersise in combining people's different abilities and strenghts. We were divided into groups of 4-5 people from both the Character Animation- and the Computer Graphic Artists' Line. Since no one knew each other nor anything substantial about movie production, a curious mindset and communication was of the utmost importance, because together we had to create a short film with a total lenght of maximum 30 seconds, inspired by a podcast. Our short film is called "Money Does Grow On Trees" and these are a couple of scenes which I did:

We were required to incorporate at least one real-life image into our productions. I like the way we came up with a way of solving that task which actually adds comedic effect to the production: