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