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