Sunday, April 06, 2014

More Umbreon

Hey guys,
I have another update on my test. I spent the morning analyzing a Milt Khal pencil test of Anita from 101 Dalmations (http://vimeo.com/68775277 the part I studied was her laugh from f43 to 69) and then wrote a bunch of  notes trying to apply what I'd learned from that to my animation. One of the main things I took away from it is that almost every key that Milt drew has some form of opposite action. All of his overlap is worked into the drawings through which enables everything to work together once inbetweened. The amount of information he included in each drawing was amazing! He was predicting where each thing would be before and after the current drawing and drew it accordingly. For example, he had a key where the head was at it's extreme up rotation, the next key had the head "translated" down but still rotated up. The key after that was the extreme down rotation with the head "translated" up a little. He placed the nose on the middle key in such a way that it's spacing worked with the previous key to create an ease out in anticipation of the next key being the extreme down. The chart between the middle key and the end key called for a single inbetween exactly half way between the two. Even when working on extreme drawings, he's still looking at what's going on with other parts of the body that haven't arrived at their end points yet. This may not sound impressive since its so easy to playblast our work, write down what's wrong, and fix it, but they didn't have anything like that back then. There wasn't a play button for them to hit to check for mistakes. Milt's fantastic grasp of the principles of animation in combination with his draftsmanship truly make his shots masterpieces. o_o

Ok, on to my animation. Lol, it seems so piddly in comparison but I imagine even Milt didn't start off being amazing. I want to continue working on it and fixing things, but it's Sunday and I spent the entire weekend animating and studying animation. At this point I NEED to do something different or else I'll arrive at work tomorrow feeling like I didn't actually have a weekend.





Saturday, April 05, 2014

Umbreon Update

I spent the day reworking my umbreon animation. It's much better than before but still has a long way to go! The lack of weight in the jump is annoying me, and I am suspecting that I might lack the drawing skills to really achieve the tight spacing that I want. =(

Tuesday, April 01, 2014

Life Drawing Dump

I really need to go to these sessions more often!