Monday, March 12, 2012

WEEK 10: Animation Direction 2 -- Guest lecturer, Luke Mistruzzi

Luke Mistruzzi, Creative Director / Animator at Powerline Films and former Cuppa Coffee stop-motion animator is returning to give us some advice about shooting our stop-motion animation.

Check out Powerline's stop-motion intro for "Growing Good Food Ideas" for SustainOntario.

WEEK 10: Character Acting 2: Quadrupeds with Guest Speaker, Cathy Feraday


Welcome back to GBC guest lecturer Cathy Feraday Miller to give us some more advice about animating 4-legged walks.

Cathy began her career at Dreamworks as a classical animator, working on the features The Prince of Egypt and The Road to El Dorado. Switching to 3D animation in 1999, Cathy has worked for various feature and game companies in San Francisco and Toronto, and has taught 3D animation at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and at Max The Mutt Animation School in Toronto. A Toronto resident since 2009, Cathy is now working with her husband Tim as Art Director and co-founder for their own independent game studio, Rocket 5 Studios.

WEEK 10: Modeling and Animation II, continued...


Assignment 4: Flour Sack Escapes!
Assigned: 14/03/12
Due: 28/04/12
% of final grade: 20%

Animate a short 2D scene in Flash starring the Flour Sack from the Disney model sheet. The Flour Sack is in the process of escaping something of your choice -- is it prison? a monster? the SS?  No need to give us the whole back story, just a little snippet of the action. Give the flour sack one simple object to interact with -- examples:

  • a manhole
  • a wall (to hide behind, to jump over, to sneak along, to squeeze under)
  • a rope
  • a pole
  • a tightrope
  • a ladder

The piece should be between 8-15 seconds long.  Optional - draw a very low-contrast, simple BG that doesn't distract from the main action. It could just be a grid for the floor to show perspective or the silhouette of a building.

Give your flour sack an opportunity to show all the animation principles you've learned. Include holds and moving holds. You may use cycles but try not to overuse them.

Try to keep the volumes consistent and use timing, spacing, and solid drawing to keep the four sack looking heavy in both his movements and posing.

Rubric:
Exemplary: Strong apparent weight, snappy timing and fluid motion with a strong grasp of all animation principles including secondary/overlapping action.

Excellent: Apparent weight and almost entirely fluid motion with a good grasp of nearly all animation principles including a good attempt at secondary action.

Acceptable: Mostly apparent weight. Motion is mostly fluid with minor errors or missing animation principles. Some attempt at secondary action.

Not Acceptable: Not convincingly heavy or not fluid with quite a few glitches or missing animation principles. no apparent secondary action.

Equal weight will be given to:
Weight, Timing, Fluidity, Overlapping Actions/Secondary Motion

Please submit files by FTP.
Please hand in 2 files, your video file and your Flash file.
You can hand in videos in any standard format except .wmv.
Ex: .mov, .avi, .mp4,
Naming convention:
tdonovan_floursack_000.avi (or tdonovan_floursack_000.mov or tdonovan_floursack_000.mp4)
tdonovan_floursack_000.fla

Please watch your naming conventions. No caps, extra characters or spaces. Feel free to number the files up to 999 as you like. It will help differentiate the files should you need to resubmit.