Motion Studies


                                                       Practice

  

Final

Task 1

Walk Cycles
I really like doing stop motion, it's hard work but very interesting, the puppets were quite difficult to use, sometimes they'd lose a hand or just flop over at the waist. In stop motion creating a character walk is quite different from 2d or 3d, I couldn't exaggerate movements or gestures as it would look unnatural or make the puupet appear broken; adding character in stop motion is much more subtle and is just as effective as 2d or 3d.


Character Walk- Shuffling

Phil Noto
is a comic artist who previously worked for Disney animation. I really enjoy his work he has an interesting style that is much finer than other graphic novel art i have seen, particularly in this image, his use of muted tones and limited palette of colour is really interesting as well as the angles and layouts he uses, they compliment the story being told and make the images more dynamic and interesting.
http://philnoto.tumblr.com/

character

I tried to keep my character quite simple as I haven't been very confident with Maya and for the most part I think I did well building the structure in Maya, but I struggled using Mudbox, but with more practice I should get the hang of it. 

Lift and Push

For the lift I parented the hands to the object, doing this allowed me to animate the body and the ball together. I found this a quite difficult at first and struggled to get the character to lift to ball up straight but I think it works well to add a sense of weight to the ball.

For the push I used inverse kinematics (IK) and forward kinematics (FK). 

IK and FK provide a hierarchy of structure to movements, for example in this I used IK to position the arms, IK starts at at the bottom of the structure for this the hands, so when I moved the hand it would also reposition the rest of the arm. this was fine to position the arms against the wall but animating with IK can make action appear more robotic as IK is linear. Whereas FK takes more time to position as it works downward in this instance starting with the shoulder and then elbow etc. FK  moves in curves which is much better for animating because it looks more natural. After positioning the first and last pose in IK I switched to FK to animate the character pushing against the wall and lined it up with the FK key frame.

I think this works well, apart from the slight pull back before the character leans in, it doesn't quite fit in.

Walk Forward

This first video, we had to animate the character walking forward. I think I could have improved on the bobbing motion a little more so it was smoother because the character looks quite twitchy whereas his actual walk forward looks good.

Walk Cycle

I really like this walk cycle, its smooth, simple and looks pretty good.

Tails

With this little fellow, I had to demonstrate overlap and follow.

I think i successfully managed to do this as the tail swishes across.

I think that for the obstacle course i could have tried making it a little more interesting but the ball and tail move well through what I had made, to improve this i would like to have added a camera move around the course as it moved forward so that you could view it from different angles.

Bouncing Ball
First piece of work in Maya, although this was an easy task and it turned out well, I had to have a few practices to get used to the software. But I think this is a good effort it has a nice squash and stretch and good speed and direction.

Drawing for animation!

For this task I listened to a song and drew to the music.

I really like the results I got, I didn't think to much about it and try to make each drawing perfect I just drew and I got some interesting compositions.

cinematography

For this project Frankie had asked us to create a short silent movie. Working with Becca, Becky, Joe, and Ashley we decided to make the film about a poker game, where there is cheating and betrayal with a touch of comedy.
Becca, Ashley and I worked on storyboarding and pulled together one final storyboard which Becca produced, Joe and Ashley were in charge of lighting and camera 2 whilst Becca and I controlled camera 1, Becky did the editing.
The idea and final outcome are to a good standard however the room we shot in was not ideal.
Our camera movements and different shots worked out well and were interesting.
Thanks to the actors for helping out and doing a great job.

                   

Drawing for animation.

Start with a scribble

I began by making a quick random pencil scribble on the page, then after looking at the lines for a while at different angles I would eventually find an image to draw within it.
This task was quite difficult in some cases but can have some very interesting results.

Practice! Hands, Feet and Faces
It can be quite difficult drawing hands and feet from observation (especially feet) but with a bit of practice I found different ways to make it easier and to help proportions by drawing basic shapes first to angles and size then slowly adding more details.
I really like using different colours to distinguish light and shadow in a drawing, like in the last two images where i have used pink to show light and blue for dark, varying the tones of each to add detail.

Duet - Glen Keane

A beautiful short created by Glen Keane,
I love the sketchy quality and fluid movements throughout.

 Final animationCharacter design

Dive

I like the way the water splash and characters movement turned out, I purposely made it so so that the robot moved quite rigidly and stretched into place and suddenly falls into the water. The diving board works well but could be improved upon as it stops quite abruptly.

animatic

Johnny Express

A fantastic short created by AlfredImageworks, a studio based in korea.
https://vimeo.com/94502406

Weight-Lift
I think to improve this piece I needed to add a little more anticipation before the lift, to show the heaviness of the object.

Walk Cycles
When played as a loop this video shows one of my first attempts at a walk cycle, I need to work on the smoothing out the movement a little and include and a better character design however I think that this is an effective demonstration

Juggling!

Initially it was quite difficult to get the timing right on this I had tried animating each ball individually as well as animating one and copying it and offsetting the timing, it took some practice but i managed to complete this task using both methods, in this video I animated each ball individually, I achieved a more natural flow to the movement by having the balls follow a lazy 8 shape instead of a rigid 8 shape, it makes it look more relaxed.

Drawing For Animation

we were giving a box of of objects to arrange on a table and draw, looking at lighting and perspectives, I found this oddly shaped bottle particularly interesting because of the way the light hit it. the light coming the through the bottle made some interesting shapes and shadows across each layer.
To gain better perspective and accurate proportions ,I used elipses to shape each rounded layer of the bottle.