An animation student from QCA directed me to this Australian animation.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Arcs
Ok Go use a technique in the linked music video (embedding is disabled) that captures frames to a green screen behind the characters. I found the original discussion on how it relates to animation in the 11 Second Club forum in a thread by Eric Scheur.
Eric writes, "This one, for the song "WTF?" was done in front of a green screen, so that each successive frame could be applied to the background as the new one was captured. It has a cool look, of course (and I love those striped sticks wiping the screen!), but it also made me think "Wow! This is like an animation tutorial about arcs!" If you've ever taken your arcs for granted, figuring that they don't need polishing "because things are kind of hurky jerky in real life, after all," this video makes a compelling case for even the hurky-jerky movements happening in pretty sweet arcs."
Arcs are an animation principle that should be applied to your animation.
Planning
What I hope my animators will discover, is that great animation works because of careful planning.
Eager new animators are so keen to jump into a software package because that is where they think animation happens.
Eventually, I hope, the realisation will come that the important animation principles are solved in the planning.
[Take deep mental breath...]
Planning is those steps that may seem unrelated to working in Flash and Maya, or a stop motion program. Planning includes important steps such as a building a production schedule, producing multiple sketchy character designs, thumbnail sketches of poses worked up into ruff key drawings where the poses are pushed for clearer communication on every draft, storyboards, line testing, giving and receiving critiques, line testing, more line testing to get the timing and spacing perfect.
To illustrate the importance of planning we can look outside of animation. How much planning do you think went into this one take music video by 'OK Go' to make it work?:
Eager new animators are so keen to jump into a software package because that is where they think animation happens.
Eventually, I hope, the realisation will come that the important animation principles are solved in the planning.
[Take deep mental breath...]
Planning is those steps that may seem unrelated to working in Flash and Maya, or a stop motion program. Planning includes important steps such as a building a production schedule, producing multiple sketchy character designs, thumbnail sketches of poses worked up into ruff key drawings where the poses are pushed for clearer communication on every draft, storyboards, line testing, giving and receiving critiques, line testing, more line testing to get the timing and spacing perfect.
To illustrate the importance of planning we can look outside of animation. How much planning do you think went into this one take music video by 'OK Go' to make it work?:
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