amanda

Here we go again with a weekly task in 3D!! Much excitement (I'm kidding). It just gets trickier and trickier, week after week. Well, in the previous week, we had to animate a fox rig jumping about with the effect of 'overlap and follow through'. This week however... we had to animate a Mike Wazowski doppelganger (also known as Monty) walking. -cues dramatic music-

I'll be really honest with you, this took me such a darn long time to animate. You know why? Cause every single time I tried animating Mr Monty here, he ends up doing a very terrible skiing movement that is very nonhuman-like (not like Monty is a human, but I'm not assuming his species).

Here you go, and I hope you like the end bit:



It definitely looks like Monty is doing a forced gravitational walk in an anti-gravitational space. Nevertheless, I liked that little touch of sass of walk confidence that I added at the end. Overall, I felt this was a much higher improvement that I've made over the other Montys that I animated the walk (or slide) for. This actually looked like a walk! -sprinkles confetti of pride over achieved task-



Have a nice day!

I personally feel that stop-motion requires more time and effort into making just one second of footage work well. Taking into account that it took me at least half an hour just to check the armature of the puppets, tightening and loosening the joints to make sure it will work properly for a single action.

I'm not gonna lie, but the puppets have started to become a little... well, not in a very good shape as probably it has been shared amongst so many students and that it has been used for the last decade or so.

The toe touch that we did before this exercise was just on level 1 of things. Stop-framing a throw however, is not level 1 nor 2, but it's definitely level 3. We had to put in some anticipation, followed by a follow-through, just to make the action believable.

Here we go:




I am just gonna be straight up honest and tell you that this is one of my most disappointing attempt at a throw and I definitely am going to re-do it because did you even see the start of it? IT WAS PAINFULLY JERKY AND SLOW.

I'll tell you one thing that I like though: it's the last bit where she looks at how far the ball went– that went smoothly.

Have a nice day!

I've always been hearing people talk about walk cycles, blablabla. In my opinion, walk cycles are also a main bit in animation because you can determine or recognise a certain character or their emotions just by their walk itself. If you look hard enough, every single one of us has a specific walk cycle when we're at ease or when we're tired. No one walk cycle is the exact same, unless you're clones or some sort.

Here's my little man doing a walk.



Before even animating a walk cycle, I didn't even know that our heads would bob up and down. I doubt anyone ever notices it when you're constantly walking all the time– until you have to animate it. This particular walk cycle took me a massively insane amount of time, I have no idea why.

Also, I really love the colours that I've used in this walk cycle. Pastel colours are the best!

Have a nice day!

Going into stop-motion classes in the beginning of the term was more of constantly asking ourselves on when will we be actually having hands on sessions with the puppets. Soon, our prayers have been answered. Not gonna lie, the puppets for us beginners were a little creepy looking... but, hey, who doesn't love a creepy looking puppet? Maybe for some people, but I definitely liked how quirky looking they all were.

So, the first task we had to do was to do a toe touch.


Unlike the talented Patrick, the puppets aren't as flexible as this starfish. To be honest, I was pretty nervous when it came to handling the puppet as I didn't want to break it at my first attempt. I mean, how much of a bad luck would that be?

There we go:



This was actually my second attempt. I definitely didn't like how the puppet ended up tilted a little sideways when she was getting back up from the toe touch. What I'm really proud of was the attention to the detail of the hair. (hehehe). This got me excited for more stop-motion exercises, to experiment around with the puppets!

Have a wonderful day!

It's a weekly thing of me going into a 3D session trying to process whatever that is going on in the big screen. After the session, I leave the studio with a head full of positivity of "I-so-know-how-to-do-it-and-I-can't-wait-to-animate-it-later". Then when the time comes for me to sit down and actually start up Maya to animate the rigs... that's when I feel like a fish out of water.

This time, we learnt about overlap and follow through. During the session, we did a trial run on making a tail have that overlap and follow through effect when it swooshes from side to side. As a task, we were given a very adorable rig to animate with. We had to make it jump onto some polygons, while having the application of 'overlap and follow through'.

So, here goes my attempt of making a fox hop onto a block.



Oddly enough, I found this exercise much easier and exciting than the others. Maybe it's because we had a real character rig to play around with after all the exercises of squishing and stretching balls. I definitely liked my timing on this exercise as it seemed smooth. I will point out that my fox's tail didn't feel like a tail but more of a swooshing of a sting. I mean, who said foxes can't have stings instead of tails?

Have a nice day!

I like how animation is a medium that manages to catch the tiniest details and bring it to life. For example, a head turn. I mean, come to think of it, we turn our heads on a daily basis, watch cartoons where most head turns happen as well. When it comes to animating them, it just gets broken down into parts.

What I really liked about this exercise was that we could design our own characters, which was cool. This exercise also showed that arcs were very useful as our head 'dips' down a little while we turn our heads. And if you were trying to turn your head several times after that sentence to test whether that statement is true or not... you deserve a star sticker!




Trust me when I say that this took me at least a solid three hours to do. One thing that I struggled the MOST was trying to keep my character looking consistent. As you can see from the video, my bug eyed human bean definitely looks different in each keyframe, which annoys me a whole lot. Definitely have to work on my consistency, or maybe do sketches of the character from different angles first before actually animating it.

LATEST ATTEMPT: <click here to view>

Until the next time- have a nice day!

As animators, we are living, breathing, walking video cameras with an ability to analyse things. We have an eye to observe how different people walk, express themselves, or even observe nature, like how the wind has effect on trees. So, what do we do with that information? We process it and then we animate it (if we can). Even itty bitty details like animating a balloon falling will bring a certain animation to life.

"Animating a balloon? Hah! Easy peasy!" -coughs- Well, I can honestly tell you, it's not a one hit wonder for me to animate a balloon floating down in stop-motion.




I definitely had fun modeling the balloon out of plasticine (I'm still keeping it). Basically, animating a balloon floating down is like animating several pendulums in an entire sequence. I had a struggle trying to get the timings right in the first place but after observing a balloon falling, which we had one for experimentation sessions in the studio, and also watching videos of balloons falling, it pretty much gave me an idea of how a balloon should realistically float downwards and have that little bounce at the end when it hits the ground.

Another exercise that was completely different to the balloon exercise is actually animating a heavy ball. I chose a cannonball and this is how it came out to be:



Even this took me several tries, but thanks to the power of the internet and the loop button on the keypad, you get to see mistakes clearly after several rounds of replaying.

Until then, have a nice day!

Maya has always been a challenge for me, to be honest. All the curves and keys and things you have to click? But after you get the gist of it, everything is fine... until the next exercise. (plays dramatic music)

So, under the theme of "squash-and-stretch", we were asked to animate a bouncing ball in a room in Maya. Sounds easy, doesn't it? It's just key framing the bounces, then squashing the ball afterwards, right? Easy peasy!!


Here's my very terrible attempt at trying to make a ball not look like a faulty-produced ball that's bouncing about.




I would say, I like the end bit where the ball has a light bounce and then stops. To me, that actually seems like a genuine bounce. The starting bit however, it was kind of jerky. Again, I might say it's an issue with the timing that I've set, or maybe it was way over-squashed.

Have a nice day!

So, what comes next after drawing tons and tons of circular objects? Boxed humans. Technically, it's a lot easier to draw the forms as simple as it is to get the action right- before drawing complex things like an actual realistic human being. After all, if the foundation is weak... not much bibbidi-bobbidi-boo can happen.

Before actually doing some digital magic on TVPaint, I drew out some sketches of how the box man should look like during each key frame of the leap. One thing I noticed was that, when we had to build up the anticipation of the character before the tiny jump, I had absolutely no trouble drawing my purple human box looking to the right, but I had a weird trouble with drawing it looking to the left.

If you've seen me constantly doing a weird thing in the studio a.k.a. turning my body left and right like some chicken doing a weird dance, that was me trying to get a sense of how the character should turn to the left and right... accurately.

Anyway-

Here's my little purple human box taking a leap of faith over a very non-existential gap. Originally, I drew expressions onto it but I removed it since the main point of this exercise was to look at the squash and stretch of the block form of a human while it's acting out certain stuffs like jumping.


Is it just me or do the colours look aesthetically pleasing to the eye? Again, I definitely screwed up on the timing. If it got slowed down a little, it would be perfect. However, I'm happy with the anticipation and reaction of my little purple being.

Have a nice day!

I've loved stop-motion since about a year ago when I was working on a stop-motion project with a group of my course mates in our foundation year. It sort of came about when the final edit was completed and we viewed it the entire video together with our lecturer and also with course mates from the entire year of that foundation course.

[-sneaks in a little self-promo-]
Not gonna lie, the process was tedious, tiring and frustrating, especially when you look through each frame and find that you should have added another frame in, and you had to try to mimic the set-up just to get that extra shot, in order for things to look more smooth-sailing.

[That plane is me/the entire project when one frame goes wrong.]

I thought we'd be able to mess around with puppets on our first assignment, but we had to do two stop-motion tasks of two pendulums instead. I guess, the foundation/basics are always more important before heading towards the big stuffs.

Here we go:

1) Free swinging pendulum:


2) Mechanical pendulum (a.k.a. in a grandfather clock):

I made a silly mistake of forgetting to bring my USB flash drive to class as I really wanted Ann to give some feedback on the pendulum swings. Overall, I found that being able to use the stop-motion bay with the right equipment and not having to rely on your phone being tied onto a block of wood, it's a great feeling. 
I like how we had to analyse grandfather clocks through videos as the free swinging pendulums can be found anywhere in the Internet universe. Thanks to <Jamie>, who shared with me a particular video which showed the movement of the pendulum in a grandfather clock. I can't seem to locate it in the YouTube-sphere... sorry about that! On a bright side of things, it gave me an insight as to how wide the points were to be apart of each other within each frame.

Have a nice day!

Ah, the 21st century filled with never-ending technology goodness and more empty pockets. I feel like most first year students would agree with me that we were all pretty excited to test out the giant Wacom Cintiq that the university has a few of in studios. [P.S.: IT IS GREAT!]

Before our first practice session on 2D, our lecturer gave us some links to learn TVPaint's interface before the practice session commenced on that week. I couldn't go through the entirety of <this video> because the voiceover was way too difficult to understand. He also told us to watch another <video> which was documented by Aaron Blaise (he used to work as an animator/supervising animator on 'Mulan', 'Pocahontas', 'The Lion King', and more) which gives us a quick start overview on TVPaint 11, and yes, I went through the entire 54 minutes of it.

After our first 2D practice session with Georg, we were given two tasks:
1) animate a bouncing ball (with no squash and stretch), following arcs.
2) animate a bouncing ball bouncing around a 3D room (with no squash and stretch)

So... here goes:

1) Bouncing ball with arcs (no squash and stretch):


2) Bouncing ball bouncing around a 3D room (no squash and stretch -internally screaming-):


Until the next bouncing ball assignment then!

Have a lovely day!