Animation

Marius's Animations

Ease
the ease is the first animation that was completed and was achieved by creating a circle and making two keyframes on either side of the page. after applying the ease in and ease out from the curves drop down menu, the circle would move organically and smoothly from one side of the screen to the other. over all this was a pretty simple task that i had no trouble with.

Pendulum swing
with the pendulum swing I created a single image of the pendulum and put the rotation pivot point at the tip of the string. after that it was just a case of repeating the steeps of the ease and move the swing of the pendulum from one side to the other and then back again.

Side walk

The side walk was interesting for me because i made a few new observations as to the bob of a character in the vertical direction. such as the highest point of a walk is generally not at the passing point of the legs, but actually the frame after on an 8 frame walk cycle. this also means that the low point is on the frame just before the passing point when the weight of the step is being processed by the character shown through a bend in the knee.



Front walk 

the front walk is the hardest of all the walks that i did. I experimented on a couple different animations trying to make the side to side motion natural. one thing i found is that with the bob and the side to side movement, if you draw a figure eight on a reference point like the head or torso and draw all the following frames to that shape, it smooths out the motion and keeps everything consistent.



Dog walk

the main stumbling block i ran into with this animation is that when i looked at the provided reference animation I was not happy with how the dog walked with the legs pinching on either side of the dog as he walked. When i looked at video reference online i saw that the legs seemed to be fairly synced up with each other with the left legs moving at the same time. I tried this and the result seemed stiff and unbelievable. I then noticed that the back legs of the dog move a few beats before the front legs but not on the extend extremes of the poses. So i animated the front and back legs on different layers and moved the front legs layer across the timeline until they moved in a believable way. what i found is that when the front legs are on their contact positions the back legs will be on their passing position. while i am now happy with how the legs move, the torso doesnt move to my liking at this stage. I would like to play around with the effect more and less bobbing in the two walk cycles would impact the final result. at this point the chest moves way too much for my liking.



jump

I enjoyed doing this animation after doing cycles up to this point. It felt good to do an animation with a start and a finish. I started with the extremes of the sequence, the anticipation for the anticipation of bending of the knees, the stretch in the jump, the weightlessness at the top of the jump and the squash at the end to neutral. I then went back and filled in the in-between which i found could be cheated to a small degree by copying the previous drawing and moving it slightly to the side to smooth out the movement without drawing an entirely new drawing. although i wouldn't recommend it as common practice as it could get obvious corner cutting that ruins the animations fluidity. but i think it worked well in this case.



Head turn

I did the in betweens first finding the start the middle and the end then filling in the rest. i focused on getting the follow through on the hair and the blink in the middle. I would have like to have an arc in the movement as well as a change of expression.




Lip sync
For this task I tried to animated the drawings in a straight ahead manner, animating each facial expression and each mouth shape. I found that the result made the character shake unnaturally and quickly. even though he was hitting all the shapes at the right times it still felt rushed. I then decided to keep the movements of the mouth more subtle so that the change in shapes wouldn't be as extreme from frame to frame. Vaughn introduced us to the shape library where we can store mouth shapes and use them to speed up the lip sync process. with my final result I found the lip sync worked well but the rest of the character seems stiff. I think next time i will have a focus on animating the characters movements first and then overlay the lip sync after that.


3 Quarter walk

I had become quite accustomed to walks by this point so the walk was pretty easy disbite the angle. all the principles  are the same.

 Cat Run

This animation is different to the 4 legged walks as all legs seem to bend and stretch consistently but all the legs touch the ground at different times. 

lift

with the lift I wanted to push the anticipation so i have him reach all the way up before going down. i further the weight of the box by him going down a second time and then really bending his body with the weight distribution. 

Horse walk

I used what i learned from the dog walk to start this animation, drawing the torso, legs and extras on seperate layers for easy correction on individual elements.

Character Study

My design process happened very backwards. With me coming  into the animation course late I started with my finished pose before I worked on concepts or the turn around. This was just because it was what the other students were working on at the time. Because I wasn't being too serious with my design at the time, I drew a character of a ninja that used a scooter to fight with, I thought it was funny at the time.

 I tried my Turn around a number of different times but kept failing to get clean accurate lines. that was until I found an easy to use curve tool that I downloaded for ClipStudio Paint. There are a few anatomy issue which I would like to go back and fix such as the shoulder in the side view being too far forward.

 Facial expressions

I wanted to show some knowledge of squash an stretch with facial expression as well as head tilts. just trying my best to get the acting across with each facial pose.

 Pose Sheet

With my poses I wanted to embrace how ridiculous the premiss of a ninja with a scooter is.
for example...
he is throwing a kick... with a scooter
he is delivering a final smack down... with a scooter
the idea of him using something so counter productive is funny to me. Why not use a sword or staff or anything else. This is what was going through my head when drawing these images.












Main Pose

I went back to edit my Illustration to fit depictions of my character in my later works. after drawing him many times during animating his appearance evolved into something quite different from my original depiction of him. I also fixed some of the line work and some personal problems I had with the colors.

What I thought about when designing this character is what are the main ninja tropes that i could pull from. So I put in the long wavy belt reminiscent of the ninja turtle masks that increase action to the poses by creating drag
or hinting at wind in the environment. As well as the belt I also included the ridiculous spiky hair that is present in many anime characters, notably Goku the main character in "Dragon Ball Z"