Saturday, May 26, 2012

CLASS 5: Modeling and Animation II: Flour Sack jump, continued

Continuing on with the flour sack...
Intermediate traditional animation techniques in Flash --
  • Working between Keys to create breakdowns and inbetweens. 
  • Combining pose-to-pose and straight ahead animation 
  • Timing & spacing for weight
  • Adding the secondary action
Posing is the most important key to making your animation great - 
Take a look at these flour sack poses you guys did last week & think about how they could communicate more clearly through a stronger line of action, simplification, and clearer weight.

Similar to the flour sack, the personality-filled rug from Disney's Alladin

This will be partly an in-class work period so I can help you work out the staging and timing for your flour sack assignments. I'll also be showing you some more tips and tricks for giving your flour sack weight & personality, both in the drawing and the timing.

And I have more 'toons for you: an incredible film by Ryan Woodward called "Thought of You" as well as the 'making of' that shows his expert use of the very tools you're using to animate the humble Flour Sack
Ryan Woodward's amazing digitally hand-drawn "Thought of You"

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

CLASS 4: Modeling and Animation II: Animation Principles, Part 3 - The famous Flour Sack


The Flour Sack: Disney's pioneering
device for learning personality and
timing
The world-famous half-filled flour sack has been used by countless animators to learn animation principles. The deceptively simple shape has many possibilities for creating personality and weight.

More Animation Principles:
  • Anticipation
  • Follow through and overlapping action
  • Secondary action
  • Appeal
The key to making nice flour sack animation is really solid drawing. We'll study some tricks for drawing 3-dimensionally and test our skills by creating drawings of the flour sack in 4 distinct moods. For example:

Confident
Sad
Wasted
Shocked/bamboozled 

Assignment 2: Flour Sack Jump in Flash
Animate the flour sack doing a simple jump. Show as many of the principles of animation as you can. All the Principles of Animation should be in this assignment, especially nuts-and-bolts tools like Anticipation, Action, Reaction, Weight, Timing, Arcs, and even more esoteric ones like Appeal.
Spend your time on the mechanics of the jump. If possible, add a little personality. Think about how heavy the sack of flour would be. Show the effort required to move that weight. 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.

Create a 640 x 480 QT with H.264 compression. Create a simple BG - just a ground line will do. You can add other props such as a wall but keep it very simple.

Assigned: May 23rd
Total Value: 15%
5% Posing Due: May 23rd end of day
10% Finished Due: June 3rd end of day

Please upload to our group folders/albums called "Flour Sack" on both DropBox and Vimeo before the start of class. Please do NOT place your files inside a folder. Watch your naming conventions.
File formats:
tdonovan_floursack_001.fla
tdonovan_floursack_001.mov

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.