samson & matilda – heavy lifting animation

Posted on March 29, 2012

Meet Samson and his dog, Matilda!

I designed them for a three-week assignment for a “heavy lifting” exercise. The focus was first on the thinking that takes place before lifting something heavy; then on portraying weight, then losing a grip on the heavy object. I could have just used a static object instead of a dog, but I really like the idea of a fat little dog (scroll down on that link for my favorite Pompeii dog).

This assignment was similar to last semester’s “stagger” exercise, where I animated a fishwife trying to lift a huge, heavy fish.

Since I was focusing on the broad action of the rough animation, I didn’t have a chance to add facial features…hopefully I’ll get to that someday!

Category: animation, ANM 692, tablet Tagged:

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3-point perspective (and 2-point vertical)

Posted on March 12, 2012

Here’s another Drawing from the Imagination assignment – three-point perspective (+ two-point vertical).

You can tell when something’s in three-point perspective when there are barely any truly vertical lines – all of them slant off to some point in the distance (in this case, out side of the picture to the bottom, right & left). The two-point vertical comes into play if you want to create an object that has a plane parallel to the picture plane (see the box on the shelf – the edges facing us are perfectly horizontal).

I didn’t use as much photo reference for this, and the thumbnails got buried in my photoshop layers so there’s nothing appealing to post from them, but it was a fun assignment once I figured out the point of view and composition that I ultimately wanted.

Category: ILL 625, perspective, tablet Tagged:

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sneaky goose walk

Posted on March 10, 2012

This assignment took WAY longer than I originally thought it would! We were given 4 key frames (major drawings showing the most important positions) plus a chart for spacing all the drawings, all from Richard William’s “Animator’s Survival Kit” book. Usually desiging/picking a character & determining those main poses takes me a huge amount of time, so I thought “Awesome! This will be so quick & easy”. Wrong.

To do a “sneak”, you need about 32 drawings per step (each one exposed twice), as opposed to about 8 drawings per step on a normal walk (like Mabel’s walk). Since there are so many in-between drawings, you have to be pretty accurate with the breakdowns (the major drawings between the keys) and there are many more important drawings that affect how the character moves from one pose to another. It took me about 10-15 hours to complete this assignment, animating a total of two steps (right foot, left foot), then copying & adjusting all the drawings so that he walks in & out of the frame.

Category: animation, ANM 692, bird, tablet Tagged:

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two-point perspective interior

Posted on March 6, 2012

In Drawing for the Imagination, we had another assignment that spanned two weeks: a two-point perspective interior. I was going for a space like the Colby Room at the Museum of Science. Here’s the final piece, with shadows plotted from the main light source & tone added to the surfaces:

The first week’s component was just laying out the basic shapes (see below, with no shading). My favorite part was finding references – and reconstructing things like the radio, table & chair – I kind of combined a few different references to create the things I wanted. I’ve been collecting photos at pinterest.com – you can see the references for this project towards the bottom of this pinterest board.

To kick off the project, I composed a few basic thumbnails to get an idea of the layout – I ultimately went with my third (bottom) thumbnail.

Category: figure drawing, ILL 625, perspective, tablet Tagged:

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mabel moves

Posted on March 1, 2012

This video is a combo of two assignments for my Traditional Animation 2 class – getting up out of a chair and “easing in” to a walk. In order to smoothly start or stop any action in animation, you have to carefully space the drawings so that the motion doesn’t start awkwardly or end too abruptly.

Keep in mind this is just a simple pencil test- no details, but hopefully the acting brings the character to life. Enjoy!

Category: animation, ANM 692, figure drawing, sketch, tablet Tagged:

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