Working with Emotion

As usual with our Motion Studies sessions, we were given a task at the end of the week/two weeks, using LAV tests to portray something in our choice of either 3D or 2D animation. I decided to use 3D this week as I want to alternate between the two.

We got feedback for all of our first semester work last week too, so I'll talk about that a little here as well c:

Anyways, our task for this week was to animate a shot of a character changing emotions, we were told to exaggerate this by putting them at different ends of the spectrum (eg. Happy to Sad or Grumpy to Excited). We were told to perform this in person and film LAV tests to work from. Our whole class went through a 6 hour acting workshop a few weeks ago to help us with LAV tests and the performance we portray in our work. This workshop was actually really fun and ended with the whole class doing a half an hour improv bench scene :3 It really helped me a lot with a sense of exaggeration when it comes to walk cycles and character, ect c:

 

Above is my LAV test, I chose to go from sad, to happy, acting as though I'd spotted someone and was happy to see them. I think I still need to work on my acting quite a bit, because this is rather cheesy xD but it helped me with what I needed it to help me with c:

 

and below is my final animation ^-^ I used the Eleven rig for this once again. I don't think I did too badly, but I think more movement in her body would've been helpful and I feel that her movement, especially in the shoulders was rather robotic at times. I think loosening up my animation, especially in 3D is something I need to work on a lot. I plan to do at least half an hour of CG animation a day and I have purchased a set of col-erase, non-photo blue pencils from Ebay (like the ones we were given at the start of the year, but I ran out) as I feel my animation is a lot looser and free in 2D when using these to start out my animations. (Interestingly it's the same in flash o-o If I begin with a light blue sketch animation, when it comes to cleaning everything up, my animation seems a lot more loose and free).
 

So yeah o: My second motion studies animation c: I'm actually really enjoying this unit and working more from observation and hopefully this unit will be another thing that will help me improve my human anatomy/animation skills as I know this is something I need to work on quite a bit. We have another motion studies session tonight, so no doubt, we'll be given another task to work with.

 

On another note, we got our feedback for all first semester work last week ^_^ My main points were that I need to work on timing, and when working with tests, I need to stop trying to tell stories and focus more on the animation c: Luckily I passed all units in first semester, so I won't need to retake anything thus far, which is good news :D But yeah, I will work on my timing and hopefully be able to improve on all points made by the end of this semester c:

also, the Iris map is on 29/30 parts now, so one more part and it'll be completed and I can put it up :D Exciting stuff c: and I also have some experimental animation and some tests for the sea project to upload at some point ^-^

 

But yes, until next time ~

 

 

Animation Practice - A new unit

One of our units for this term is 'Motion Studies', we've only had two sessions of this, but as far as I can tell we're going to get small practice tasks for each session, to do with movement. Our first task (for last week) was to do a rough animation of someone lifting a heavy object. This could be done in any medium we had learned so far and we were told to make a reference video to work from with this. My reference video is below

 

and my rough animation is as follows




After showing this to my lecturer, he was curious to know why I didn't include the wobbles in the animation, I didn't because it was not something I meant to do when filming and I wanted to perfect it in the animation. But after talking to him, we both agreed it would've been beneficial to have left the wobble in.

Our class now has weekly motion studies lectures and we get set a variety of tasks every week or every two weeks in relation to performance and character animation. I'll make sure that I keep this blog updated on what I'm doing in relation to that c:

My main interest right now is 3D, but I also want to continue learning and improving my skills with 2D animation (especially in regard to the basic principles as Timing in particular is something I need work on a lot) So I think I will alternate my tasks between 2D and 3D mediums :3