[ p l a c i d c h a o s / A M ]

I just noticed that I got hit with a barrage of porn spam in the referer section. I made changes that will hopefully keep the automated spam bots from being able to attack this site again. In the meantime, don't click on those links.

If you do...
1) you're a sicko
2) you're encouraging spammers
3) you're a sicko

Don't be that person!

Class this week was on exaggeration and weight. The assignment was to refine/clean up the vanilla walk cycle we blocked out last week.

Here's my first pass.

Here is my final vanilla walk, much better if I do say so myself.

Along with the cleaned up vanilla walk, an additional assignment was to create a pose of Stu appearing concerned.

It may be a bit "over the top," (I loved that movie as a kid), but I'm just practicing what I learned in the lesson this week...

The lesson this week was an introduction on creating walks. Everything from poses(contact, breakdown, extreme up, extreme down), timing, common mistakes, and tips and tricks were covered.

Our assignment was to download yet another new character, Ballie, the famous ball with legs, and animate two cycles of him doing a vanilla walk from a side view. A "vanilla" walk is basically a way of saying a generic walk, devoid of personality or emotion. Along with the walk, we were also to create a pose of Stu that best communicated that he was strong, even though in real life Stu is weak and cowardly. It's true. Once in gym class he broke one of his little stick legs playing kickball. What a wimp.

Here is the vanilla walk blocking pass. Click the image to view Ballie's first steps!

Here are my strong poses

There was a discussion on the AM forum about how to show strength in a character with such skinny limbs without relying on props. My view was that true strength was not so much a physical thing, which could be portrayed by cliche muscle poses, but rather complete and total self-confidence. I posed Stu in three poses, the left one based off Frank Zane (a famous bodybuilder), the center one loosely based on Superman (the poster-child of self confidence), and the right one from a photo of the Govenator during his bodybuilding prime. Even without the planned staging, the middle pose is easily the "strongest." Pun certainly intended...

So here I am, currently in week 8 of the FIRST EVER quarter of Animation Mentor, the online animation course taught by not one, but three Great White Animation Ninjas. In a perfect world I would have had this "blog" (which, by the way, is a lame word) up eight weeks ago, so that anyone interested could have followed along from the beginning, however I am off the hook because in case you haven't stepped outside in a day or so, the world is far from perfect. AM could easily be a full-time endeavor (think EA hours, not banker's...), plus I still have to work, and have time to tickle my wife and practice my nunchuck and computer hacking skills, so I've sworn off sleeping. Fortunately it hasn't been too difficult to do, thanks to copious amounts of caffeine and crack cocaine, (that was a joke mom, I cut back my caffeine intake drastically) and like most ninjas I am more effective at night anyway. In these dark hours, while others are sleeping or leaping from rooftop to rooftop, I can be found making balls bounce and tails wag...

It's my hope that through AM I will finally receive the quality education in animation that I have been yearning for. My plan with this site is to show my progression through the six quarter course, (I'm in it for the long haul baby, or at least until Initech notices those penny fractions missing), to lose the ego and invite crits, and also help anyone interested in animation further their education into the art. In the future I will try to show more images and write less, not because "pictures are worth a blah blah..." but because they are cooler than listening to me talk. See, I'm looking out for your best interest.

This is the first true post of placidchaos.com/AM but I will back-date work from the previous seven weeks, so be sure to go back and check that stuff out as well. That being said, since I am posting them all tonight, those posts will obviously be lean in comparison to future posts.

As always, feel free to leave comments, questions, and critiques when you see fit or merely feel the urge. Also, please bear with me as I unroll this portion of my site, as I am sure there will be bugs that'll need to be squashed.

Peace!

This week we learned more about arcs and paths of action. Arcs are extremely important if you ever want to breath life into an object, due to the fact that organic creatures don't move linearly. In fact, the only things that usually move linearly are mechanical. That being said, the use of arcs really points out the difference between a true animator and someone who just moves things from point A to point B. It all comes back to constantly observing the world around you...

The assignment this week was to download another new character, "1-leg," and animate him from a side view doing a single jump, including the landing and settle. Sounds pretty easy, but you can see that we're starting to put it all together now; arcs, paths of action, squash and stretch, anticipation, and successive breaking of joints.

Here is my first attempt

I was trying to show the character jump, and then come down with his weight shifted too far back, thus having his momentum shoot him backwards where he finally catches himself and settles. It became obvious after receiving initial feedback that what I was trying to accomplish wasn't reading well.

Here is a revised final. Much better I think.

Overlapping Action: a pain in my butt. This weeks lesson was very good and I thought I understood it, however implementing what I thought I had learned has turned out to be more difficult than I expected. For this weeks assignment we were to download a new character, Tailor, who, as you've probably guessed, has a tail.

A ball with a tail...

Our assignment is to make Tailor bounce at least three times across the screen in a forward direction, from a side view. It didn't help that I had a busy week in my regular life, but this is by far the worst assignment I have turned in, in fact I didn't even get it finished. Bobby even talked to me about it... Not a good way to draw attention to yourself, let me assure you. Even though it's horribly incorrect and I am embarrased to show it, I swore the animation ninja plegde to lose the ego and show all my crappy work.

This first playblast is the version I turned in. It's obvious that it's not finished; the tail loses it's overlap after the first hop. It's sad too because I just started to understand how overlapping worked, and then I ran out of time.

This is my attempt to finish and tweak the assignment, and to the untrained eye it may look better, or even good, but trust me it's not.

Here is another revision, but I'm still not happy with it, and as you can see I kinda gave up at the end. What a quitter.

Eventually I will come back and practice more with Tailor. Maybe.