Fri, January 8, 2010

Thankfully this is my last assignment of the term, so all these walking puns will come to a close (or should I say, they've run their course?). If you think you've suffered, I started writing this entry three or four weeks ago when I was actually working on this assignment, but then it languished because holiday distractions kept me from finishing, so I've had the damn Brady Bunch song stuck in my head ever since!

Here's the hard-won final animation of my personality walk. If you can figure out what the personality is, there's a shiny penny in it for you. I'm told the moving camera makes it harder to read the personality, but I wanted a moving camera because A) the character is walking so fast I'd have to move a static camera way back to keep him from walking out of frame, and B) I really like a moving camera. It's one of the main reasons I wanted to be a movie director and not a painter – right under "can't draw for shit" and "hate getting paint on my hands."

I reworked the movement a lot, in response to feedback from my mentor and fellow students, and taped some video reference of myself doing the walk in order to focus on the elements that best captured the personality. For me, these were the very quick hip rotations and the heavy, forceful steps – without getting "stompy."

Just for the hell of it, here it is again without the legs.

The up-and-down movement always feels stronger to me without the legs present, which is kind of a shame because I typically animate the ball first, get it feeling right, then incorporate the legs. So I end up having to go back and add more force to the up-and-down once the legs are turned on because they've drained some of the force out of it. As my mentor said, it's better to start off pushing too far and then dial back as needed – I really need to keep that in mind.

Of course, all of the above is in the distant past now. My assignment was turned in, I incorporated my mentor's feedback into a quick revision, and my first term at Animation Mentor wrapped up. Now I'm on to term two: the Psychology of Body Mechanics! I met my new mentor, Justin Barrett, last night, and he's a lot of fun. I've already shot video reference for my first assignment of this term – video which will not be available on this site until I get my fat ass to a gym! (I'm just lucky Ballie is a round dude.)