The first incomplete animations.

Both of these are works in progress.


Animating has only in the last two days started running relatively smoothly. Being the first piece that I've animated in about a year i took me a couple of days to remind myself on how things worked - "Ah! The Graph Editor! I remember that."

The first couple of pieces i created were truly terrible so this is about the 4th time I've animated scene 3 and i got a bit bored of doing it, so i decided to apply my now refreshed (though limited) animation knowledge to one of the other scenes and go back to scene 3 in a couple of days.

I've started using video referance properly for the first time and i can't believe that i havn't used it before. Its been immensly helpful with posing and arcs, and in real life you do things thats you would never think to add off the top of your head.
For example when i was filming myself weight lifting for referance everytime before i lifted the weights i would do something to loosen up my muscles, whether it was shaking my hands off or stretching my neck to one side it was a involuntary movement that i never would have clocked to add to the scene. These little details - although a pain to add in - are what makes good animation and really brings your characters to life.

Although this did lead me down the side route of being overly ambitious, I ended up thumbnailing and trying to add all kinds of slouches, jumps and stretchy/yawn hybrids to the movement until 2 days later it dawned on me that i only had about 110 frames to animate the scene and far too much happening. So big cut back and now he just has a quick arm shake to loosen up as he's moving towards his rocks (don't look for it, it ain't done yet.)



This shot (4) is alot closer to completion, i've got a couple more elements to add to it before i feel its been done to a reasonable standard, no more than 2 hours work, spoke to Dan Dahli today and he commented that the timings need to be a bit more uneven to add weight to the movement - something i completely agree with - but due to the ever pressing time restrictions i'm going to leave this for today and make a start on shot 32, which is one of the harder shots and is probably going to need some more time spent on it.

Edit - Just noticed the timing on his bounce (shot4) are off kilter to the weight lifiing....bugger.