Week 6: Animals

The last week came to a bit of an abrupt ending for me, had a bit of a cold so didn't get anything finished. The brief was for two animal movements. A fish, and either a bird or a snake. We started off by heading down to the London Aquarium, down by Waterloo. Spent the morning looking at and drawing fish, then headed back to the studio to watch the footage and get to work on animating.

I found this the most difficult of the three animals because there are quite a few different aspects to animating the fish. Firstly the path it takes, then the issue of adding the tail in accordance to the sinusoidal wave of the fish, then there's the addition of the fins and then the head details. A lot to take in.

Week06_2DProject_Animals_Fish_Ones from Karl Lawson on Vimeo.

Week06_2DProject_Animals_Fish_Twos from Karl Lawson on Vimeo.

Week06_2DProject_Animals_Fish_ Path from Karl Lawson on Vimeo.

I spent the best part of 5 days working on the fish but I'm still not convinced by my results so I think I'll have to go back to it a some stage.

Week06_2DProject_Animals_Fish_Draft from Karl Lawson on Vimeo.

I found the bird much more user-friendly. The hardest part in my opinion are the wings, and that's a matter of how you try to match up the feathers. The movement is quite fluid, though I've not attempted to do it banking round a corner, which might be a bit more problematic.

Week06_2DProject_Animals_Bird_Pigeon_Movement Test from Karl Lawson on Vimeo.

Week06_2DProject_Animals_Bird_Pigeon_Draft from Karl Lawson on Vimeo.

We also managed to squeeze in a bit of Flash, where we worked on Nesting Symbols (see below).

Week06_FlashProject_Nesting Symbols_Screwface from Karl Lawson on Vimeo.

I'm feeling Flash growing on my a bit more and I understand it's a time-saver, but I hope I dont' have to become that pragmatic in my approach just yet.

Anyways, I'll keep posting with updates.
Enjoy, and comment please.
Thanks.

Uploads

Thanks to some advice from Frankie S, I've been able to put embed my Vimeo files to the blog so they're more accessible, though if you want to go directly to my Vimeo page then that's cool too.

Week 5: Walk cycle

During this week we worked on walk cycles and the expression of moods. We discussed how subtleties in posture and stride affected how a walk or stance could be read. This again, lead to a lot of embarrassing acting out of scenarios as a means of research.

Week 5:

This is a cycle of a tiptoe movement. It still needs a bit of work done to it. The head is rather jerky and the arms aren't doing what they should:

Week05_2DProject_Walk Cycle_Tip Toe from Karl Lawson on Vimeo.

This is an "angry walk" though I feel there needs to be more a more emphatic movement in certain parts to convey the anger even more. The character is rather heavily based on a certain England international footballer:

Week05_FlashProject_Walk Cycle_Angry from Karl Lawson on Vimeo.

This is the start of a "mood change" sequence. The idea is that the character is feeling one emotion thendue to a signal or sign they notice this changes. The two emotions are ideally contrasting and the more theatrical the easier it is to understand. The idea behind mine is my footballer strutting about the pitch only to see he is about to be substituted:

Week05_FlashProject_Walk Cycle_Mood Change from Karl Lawson on Vimeo.

Week 4: Life Drawing

This is a collaboration effort. We had to spend 5 minutes drawing then move on to someone else's page, and went on for about half an hour.

This is a sketch to basically display the motion of a walk

Week 3: Life Drawing

Week 4: Weight, balance, anticipation

During this week we researched how to animate how to make a character show exertion of effort either with a push, pull, or lift sequence. The idea is to show strong silhouettes so the audience does not have to work too hard to understand the pose. Secondly, understanding the weight of the object being moved and also using anticipation to exaggerate the effort needed to carry out the action. I found this one of the more stressful weeks of the course so far, which is probably reflected in the quality of the work.

Week 4:

Week04_FlashProject_PullKeyframes from Karl Lawson on Vimeo.

Week04_2DProject_LiftDraft from Karl Lawson on Vimeo.

Week04_2DProject_PushKeyframes from Karl Lawson on Vimeo.

Weeks 4 - 5: Absence makes the heart grow fonder

For anyone who actually reads this stuff I'm sorry for the delay in uploads. I'm clearly a raving mad hedonist, who has no regard for schedule or organisation. Rest assured I'll try to be more prompt and structured in future.

Over the past two weeks at CSM we've been exploring the following: weight, balance, anticipation, pose to pose animation, forces and biped walk cycles. A lot to fit into two weeks. Along side this, we've had our regular life drawing classes on Wednesday. Personally, it was a period of maximum effort but minimal result in week 4, but week 5 was a bit more successful, having finally made something ok-looking on Flash.

Uploads imminent at the usual address: http://vimeo.com/karllawson/videos

Week 3: Followthrough, Anticipation and Timing

Started off today working no some follow through. This would be items that have an action that is not in sync with the primary movement but is still simultaneous eg: a superhero's cape.

Currently working on something a bit more complicated so that'll be up at the end of the week but, in the meantime, I'm just uploading some quick testers I made on Monday, so you get the idea.




Here's the end product (well, a draft version at least)

Week03_2DProject_Followthrough & Anticipation from Karl Lawson on Vimeo.

"Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends":



This is a mix up of the exercises we did this week: Anticipation, Followthrough, Timing and Tricks. Bit of a rush job. Hopefully There'll be a new improved version soonish.

Week 2: Life Drawing

15 minute pencil drawings from four different sides of the model. (1hr)
Pencil and charcoal drawing (1 hr)
Ink drawing using tissue and sticks (30 min)
Ink drawing using tissue and sticks (30 mins)
Coloured pencil drawing of the foot, in an attempt to show points of articulation.

Week 2: My Bitbot Designs

Week 2: No balls please, I'm British

This past week has been a load of balls, bouncing balls to be more specific. We had to research and animate two bouncing balls (one hard, one soft preferably).

Life drawing kicked in on Wednesday which involved the banning of "outlines", drawing with tissues and a naked man with a mean glare holding hands with a skeleton. Weird.

Last, but not least we submitted designs for the Bitbots competition for designing some vinyl toys. It took me a while but I got into it in the end and came up with ideas for characters which I'll also put up on here.

Bowling Ball:

Week02_2DProject_Final_Bouncing Ball 2 from Karl Lawson on Vimeo.

Football:

Week02_2DProject_Final_Bouncing Ball 3 from Karl Lawson on Vimeo.

Beach Ball:

Week02_FlashProject_Final_Bouncing Ball 1 from Karl Lawson on Vimeo.

My first Flash tutorial and the 1st of 3 bouncing ball of the week. Can you guess what it is?

Week 1

So this week I finally started my PG Dip Character Animation course.

The week consisted of several exercises from X-sheets, bouncing balls to walk cycles, some After Effects experimentation and an odd meeting in Conway Hall where we were addressed by the Dean of the University.

The following link will lead to my Vimeo page, where I've posted all the animated work I've done this week.

Week01_Exercise_WalkCycle001 from Karl Lawson on Vimeo.

Week01_Exercise_WalkCycle002 from Karl Lawson on Vimeo.

Week01_2DProject_Test001 from Karl Lawson on Vimeo.

Week01_2DProject_Test003 from Karl Lawson on Vimeo.

Week01_2DProject_Final_BalancingAct from Karl Lawson on Vimeo.

Brief exercise of an animated head stall trick.

Week01_AEProject_Final_BrainMatter from Karl Lawson on Vimeo.

Project was to get used to After Effects by creating camera movements in a similar way to a rostrum camera in opening credits of BBC's "Grange Hill" http://youtu.be/hsMVEp3XtQQ or the "What's the Plan?" scene from Channel 4's "Spaced" http://youtu.be/Yt-JQm-t36I



This is basically a narrative about myself.

So this is the New Year (academically)

Right. I'm planning on being a lot more proactive with this blog page thanks to some helpful advice from funtime Frankie. Hopefully I'll have weekly uploads of my work and I'll try to get some ideas down on here as well. Mobile internet is a great help for that.

Animation Reel

My 2009-10 showreel