Oliver Castle - BA(Hons) Computer Animation Arts

Today's session was the next step up from last week's walk cycles. This time we recorded ourselves doing a 'silly walk' (a la Monty Python). Then we sketched it out on paper. And animated it! To be honest, I'm not really proud of it. The walk was so odd it's kind of hard for me to actually figure out what the hell I was doing and that naturally made it hard to translate it into animation.

Walk Cycles! That was the focus of today's session, and I was rather excited to get stuck in with it. I've tried doing walk cycles before in my own time, but I could never quite get them to look right. The stuff I did today finally does, even if it's a little rough. Nice and simple really, just have to get that curve right for the person bobbing up and down. It looks a little weird, but that's just because people don't usually move faster than most cars. Not the easiest image to actually decipher, since it's just a mess of green blobs, but it works so who cares. He's a little shaky, but I think he'll get there in one piece. Wherever there is.

Here's the playblast for the our vehicle moving then skidding. Nothing fancy, but cool nevertheless. Here is a far fancier version of basically  the same thing except not really. Possibly slightly less cool, I'm genuinely not sure. I like it though. In somewhat relevant news, I have made a twitter account . Since apparently that is a thing people on the course do and as I am on the course I guess I should do it also.

Today's session was adding little effects to our bouncy balls. I started with a fox tail, then tried some frog/flea legs and finally a very terrible at flying bird.

Today we had a session on different weights, how differently weighted objects will react differently when hitting the ground.  First a ball bouncing along in a cartoonish style, stretching and squashing. Then a heavy bowling ball, a light ping pong ball and finally a tennis ball. Here is the onion skins from the above animation, it's a little messy since I tried to have them overlapping.

Today's session was all about Timing and Spacing. First we have a coin moving across the screen at a constant speed, then a coin that eases in and out as it moves and speeds up. After that we have a (deliberately) failed pendulum, since it has no arc. Then the correct pendulum moving along it's proper arc, it also speeds up as it moves down and slows as it reaches it's apex. Here is just the onion skins for all the above animations, showing the placement of each frame.

Today's task was essentially bringing together everything we've learned over the past few weeks, stretching, squashing, weight, layering, etc, into one animation.

Today's session was about overlapping action, we were tasked with re-creating our bouncing balls and adding more animation on top on a separate layer. I gave mine a tongue. Honestly, I don't like it. It didn't turn out how I wanted it to, partially because I thought I could make it work simply by transforming the tongue when I really should have just redrawn the tongue each frame. Hindsight is twenty twenty I suppose. And I've got awful eyes anyway.

Today we had a session on different weights, how differently weighted objects will react differently when hitting the ground. Here's what I ended up with. First a ball bouncing along in a cartoonish style, stretching and squashing. Then a heavy bowling ball, a light ping pong ball and finally a tennis ball.

Today's session was focused on Timing and Spacing.  We started with doing a simple animation of a circle moving back and forth at a constant speed, then moved on to a circle that eases in and out, gaining then losing speed. After that we made a pendulum or arc for a circle to travel along at a constant speed, obviously this just doesn't look right, so we made another one in which the circle speeds up as it reaches the low point and slows down as it rises.

Friday was the day for our 'Animation and Character' lesson, though like much this week it was basically just going through the basics. Learning Adobe Animate (A.K.A. Flash) was interesting since I haven't touched it in about 8 years so it was nice seeing how much easier I found using it. I'd probably chalk it up to skills from other programs and techniques crossing over. It did help actually having someone competant teaching us though. We went through the session learning how to make frame by frame transitions between a sketch of our own faces to our favourite food then to our favourite animal, then looping back around. It was a nice little task that took up the whole session, and though I feel I probably could have put a little more effort into it (still not great at drawing on a tablet, or in general) I'm happy with the result.