Life Drawing Session Three

This is my third life drawing session and these are the sketches I came out with...

Character Development

"Select a character in period costumes that can be from your earlier assignments. You are required to develop drawing and knowledge of animation principles over three A3 sheets to express the characters personality in still images."

For this project I have to produce a written profile to establish the characters personality, do a series of studies that show a variety of expression and produce a turnaround of the character by rotating it 90 degrees at a time from front to back. 

So I started of by doing some research into different time periods ..from Mesopotamia (3500-559 BC) right the way through to the nineties! I ended up looked at the 'Space Age' in the 1960's...particularly around when the first man landed on the moon. This gave me an idea for an American astronaut in the 60's. i then did a few sketches of astronauts that I found on google images..

From these I came up with this character...

I will add the rest of my work on here soon (character profile, turnaround and emotion sheet)

Overlapping Action and Follow Through

"You are required to produce a line drawn sequence of at least five seconds of animation that demonstrates overlapping action. Basically when an object or a character stops suddenly , anything flexible will carry on moving. The greater the flexibility, the further it will continue. This can apply to parts of the character themselves e.g. cheeks and hair and of course to their  clothes and anything they happen to be carrying. Follow through enables the viewer to in the full consequences of a particular action."

For Christmas I got the book 'The Animators Survival Kit' and in this it has an example of a whip. I started off by exploring this and see how it works. I will try out the movement of the whip first and if it goes well I may add in a character using it. This is the animation I made from it....

This was ok, but didn't particularly interest me and there wasn't a whole lot going on. I felt that the 'snap' bit wasn't quite right either.

I then had another idea, I was going through some videos on my phone and found some of some friends jumping on a trampoline. I saw how their hair floated around freely and their clothes. 

So I decided to look up people jumping on trampolines on 'YouTube' to find a clearer video to work from and possibly someone doing flips to make it more exciting than someone just jumping up and down. 

From some videos I found I then sketched a few sequences of them jumping...

I the decided on a sequence...and animated it. Here is the video..

Half way through animating I became ill and so was unable to do as much as I had liked to. Then when I did animate it I found that I didn't need half as many frames as I had drawn and so there for instead of having a 5 second animation I was left with a 2 second one. However I felt I did the best I could under my circumstance at the time. I am very happy with the effect and very pleased with how real the bounce on the trampoline looks.  I the came up with another idea.. I decided to make another animation the same but when the person jumps on the trampoline and is about to do the flip I would zoom in and show it in slow motion and then cut back to being zoomed out to finish when he lands. This way you can see the overlapping and follow through of the hair etc and its a little longer...

I wasn't too sure about how the video is cut but I was pleased with the slow motion of the flip. 

Overall I found this a successful piece of work.

Materials

For this brief I had to produce an animated sequence demonstrating the principles of animation and use of character in relation to the physical properties of materials.

I had to choose one object/material from a list and work in a team with the other 2 animators - each person had to choose something different. One of my team members chose a bucket of water and the other a lump of clay. I wasn't too sure what I was going to choose and got a bit stuck...

"Rather like the game of rock paper scissors, consider what would happen when one object/material meets another. Devise a short scenario for your object meeting another persons object. Animate the sequence. Don't worry about scale. For this assignment Blackpool tower can be the same height as a milk bottle. think about the actual materials involved and how they would affect each other. Your group should aim to produce a continuous piece of animation with each persons object animating to the next persons. As one object disappears another takes it place."

Each person should animate at least 5 seconds.

Still not knowing what object I was going to do I experimented...i took a few object from the list and played around with them, seeing how I could manipulate them and make them move to give them a character and to portray different emotions. These are some sketches I came up with...

In the end I decided to do the steel girder..

This is my part of the animation...

At the beginning of the project it was hard to get going as no one in the group knew exactly what we needed to do. However after a while and after being shown some examples we were fine. There were some communication problems as we had all gone home for christmas. My animation was last and so was the last one to do my part and didn't have very long to do it.

Despite that I managed to finish it and overall was quite happy with it! 

Force, Weight and Volume

This week's brief was 'Force Weight and Volume'. I had to begin and end an animated sequence with a square. The square had to be central in the paper and be six by six centimetres. Then by using the imagination I had to take the square through as many transformations as possible from which it once again emerges as a square. 

I needed to consider force weight and volume and how perspective might be used. I also had to use the skill of anticipation that I had learnt previously. And the animation needed to be several seconds. 

 I came up with a few ideas...this was my first

This is the animation I started to make from my first idea..

And this is my final animation..

Overall I am very happy with the result of my animation. I feel that it answers the brief efficiently by showing force weight and volume! I loved animating the splash at the end and love its outcome. I gave this animation sound - of which I made myself except the splash at the end, I feel that it gave it an extra bit of life and emphasized the movement. 

Pose to Pose

This was our second brief but was I was only given 2 days to do it and it was in the time frame given for the anticipation project.

In this brief we had to make a short animation where it was made so that it could be looped. I did a cat running and leaping..

I was very pleased with the finished product and feel that it loop easily and smoothly. 

Life Drawing Session Two

I've just had my second life drawing session, these are the sketches I did...

The first four are again the walk cycle like we did in the first session. I took a different approach to it this time...I made each pose separate.

And then we had more 30 second poses 

Here a prop (pole) was introduced but still only had 30 seconds to draw