Archives for: July 2005, 10

Class 2: Week 3

July 10th, 2005

Our class this week was totally wicked! Rick O'Conner, from ILM fame, was our guest lecturer and we followed him as he took a shot from beginning to end. While he didn't cover anything particularly new or mind-blowing, it was definitely awesome to watch a pro tackle a shot, and I would probably rank it as the best AM class yet. It really reinforced how vital the planning/thumbnailing stage of the animation process is, as well as the need for video reference. It's not until after studying the reference frame by frame, and roughing out the timing and ALL his poses on paper that Rick even approaches the computer.

Our assignment this week was to finish/clean up the personality walk that we have been working on for the past two weeks. Here is what I handed in.

Yeah, pretty stinky, eh? I would have to say that it is easily the worst animation (if it even qualifies to be called that), that I have done since starting AM. The timing is bad, the spacing is bad, the cleanup is bad, and the anticipation and overlap are even worse.

It's almost like I forgot everything I have learned so far in AM...
1) I didn't have enough breakdowns
2) the keys and breakdowns that I did have were spaced too evenly
3) I didn't have all the controls keyed on the same frames in the blocking stage, so cleanup was near impossible
4) and the list goes on...

So yeah, it's a horrible piece o' poo, but I think I learned more from this failure than any of the other decent assignments (not that makes me feel any better watching it). I think the most important thing is to thumbnail and block much tighter, which was also reinforced by watching Rick. Doing all of that planning on paper keeps you in control of the animation and keeps the computer from taking over, otherwise you end up with floaty, even, and spline-y crap like this. Lesson learned.

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