Wed, November 18, 2009

Along with all the work I've been doing in class on character poses, I've also had actual assignments involving animation: creating an illusion of movement through the use of timed drawings. (In this case, the "drawings" are computer renderings – and thankfully so, because I can't draw to save my life.) Now that I've finally dug up the video encoding instructions that worked best for onebee last summer, I can share the clips I've created so far.

We began in week three with a bouncing ball – the starting point in pretty much every demonstration of animation. It's a good example of timing and spacing: the concept of how fast an action occurs, and also where along its path of motion an object can be found at each frame. For instance, a ball may take 10 frames to bounce on the ground twice, meaning the timing is five frames up and five frames back down. But the all-important spacing is what makes the ball look like a bouncing ball and not just a robotic dot moving mechanically across the screen. It moves quickly up from the ground, then slows at the peak of its arc as gravity acts on it, then accelerates toward the ground again. So, a bouncing ball makes a good place to start experimenting with these concepts. And start we did:

Pretty fantastic, right? Worth the wait? Well, you have to admit it was at least as good as Shark Tale. And, simple as it seems, there's plenty you can get wrong. My timing and spacing passed muster, but I was admonished for some rotation choices that seemed good at the time, but in retrospect might not add up. I thought as the ball hit the wall moving upward, that contact might give it a little more spin, which would keep it moving clockwise until it impacted the ground moving the other direction. I probably should've tested this out with an actual ball. Luckily, I had an opportunity to correct this in the following week's assignment, which was to animate two bouncing balls, of differing weights.

The idea here is that the different materials bounce differently, so just by making some animation choices you can clearly communicate which is a bowling ball and which is a basketball. Some people chose to color their balls, or make one larger than the other, but I stuck to my principles – just like I steer clear of props in the Stu poses. This assignment is about using animation to differentiate the balls, not color and size. I like the fact that, for the initial fall, you can't tell what's going to happen, but as soon as they hit the ground, you know they're different weights. Reminds me of Galileo, with his feather and bowling ball plummeting through a vacuum at exactly the same rate. After that impact, of course, things are very different for the two balls, based on the way their mass and material interact with the ground.

Next, we got a ball with a little "squash and stretch" to it, so we were able to start our animated clips with the ball leaping from a static position, rather than falling. Squash and stretch is another foundational principle of animation, and it doesn't always mean the gooey kind of squash and stretch you get with a rubber ball. It can also refer to the way you bunch your limbs up into a coiled shape before jumping, then extend and stretch out as you leap into the air. We were also provided with an obstacle course for our squashy, stretchy ball to move through – and here's what I came up with.

After that, we moved on to "overlapping animation," which is one of those key principles that really sticks out at you when it's done wrong. It refers to the fact that different parts of an object move at different times. The parts don't necessarily have to overlap each other in space, but their movements overlap each other in time. When they don't, you get animation that feels very wooden, or like an old timey Chuck E. Cheese animatronic character – where he pivots his hips, stops, then raises his arm, stops, then waves his hand. To work on overlapping action, we animated a pendulum swinging from a block. Each segment of the pendulum arm moves at a different time from the others, because its inertia keeps it in place until the segment above it pulls it one way or the other. I tried to give my block a little bit of character by getting it into a predicament and getting it back out.

Finally, this past week, we were given a real character! Well, he's actually just a bouncing ball with a cute little raccoon tail, but he's undeniably intended to be a creature and not an inanimate object, so this was a big thrill. His tail, like the swinging pendulum, was intended to demonstrate overlapping animation, but meanwhile his body could demonstrate anticipation, squash and stretch, timing and spacing, and all the other great concepts we've learned. I came up with a very tiny story for him, with an obstacle and a goal with motivation (each assignment has a strict frame limit – in this case, 120 frames, which is five seconds).

In the end, perhaps I was too carried away with giving him character, because my mentor wasn't all that thrilled with the idea of him hanging in midair for that ninja flip power slam move which finally topples the wall. I really liked it – and I worked very hard on it – so I'll have to get some clarification in tonight's class. It may be that we're not expected to add in such cartoony details at this stage; they're just trying to focus us on making everything look believable. I certainly think there's room for some exaggeration within these assignments, but if the school's goal is to drill the fundamentals first, I'm happy to experiment with the other stuff on the side for now.

I hope you enjoyed the clips – thanks for watching!

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