Friday, February 18, 2011

Week 6: Action analysis, continued

Time to polish up those assignments -- they're due next class.  We'll work on them a bit in class today.
Next week: MIDTERM EXAM!  BoooooOOOoooo ...
If there's anything you're in doubt about, now's the time to speak up!

Homework:
  • Finish polishing your Action Analysis assignments.  Have the final product and your live action reference posted for MONDAY, Feb 28th.
  • Get ready for next week's midterm! Guess what it's about? the 12 Principles of Animation!  It will be based on everything you've learned so far.  Review the work you've done going back to day 1.  This will be a practical test so be sure you understand the tools such as the graph editor, setting and moving keys, adding secondary action, and working from live action reference.

This week we'll have a look at some animation from films that borrowed (without stealing) from live action reference.  We'll see how they added snap, weight, and energy to the animation using exaggeration, contrast, and little tricks like overshoot and settle.

Studying good animation frame by frame is a great way to steal -er, borrow- tricks.  Often making animation look more snappy involves moving the character quickly enough to create large gaps in the spacing bookended by lots of close favours. With this punchy, zippy of animation, your posing is your primary concern. Plan your animation carefully to give your audience enough time to understand the chracter's actions even though they may move very quickly from one pose to another.  Smooth paths of action are extremely important when things start moving speedily -- the characters should follow strong screen arcs that the audience can easily follow, broken up by sections of sharply contrasted motion.  But talking about this isn't really painting a clear picture -- time to watch some cartoooooons...

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