This is a personal journal started from the 24 of October

Principles of Animation: Push, Pull and lift exercises part 1

We were asked to film ourselves and our classmates doing the push, pull and lifting objects in real life just to observe their movements.

We then sketched out those key moments per exercise and let our teacher look through them before we start animating digitally.

It took me a while to get the movements right as same as my teacher’s approval as the feet keep on sliding at the wrong time.

However, I am really satisfied with the result and look forward to doing the other exercises next week.

Reflection from class:

It’s definitely harder than I thought it would be because with any wrong key moment could make the whole animation looks odd so I had to be extra careful.

However, luckily that we shot the footage because it wasn’t too hard to animate. Still, it took me some time to understand how much weight the wall has on the audience.

Introduction to Maya Technical Workshop:

I haven’t done any 3D animation since 2020 so I struggled quite a bit at the beginning when we were doing the blocking process.

This is also the first class that I completely forgot to take pictures when I was doing the blocking for the plane. Hence, I only have this one video of the plane flying in circle.

Reflection from class:

I haven’t really had a chance to learn Animation Graph Editor or Motion path so I had a lot of fun doing the exercise although it was really hard to grasp at first since there were so many things to remember.

At the end of the day, I feel more comfortable with Maya but not as much as I used to. Hence, I would like to do more 3D animation exercises in the future.

Presentation on the 26th of Oct: 

Link to presentation and references:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1MJd5EQwoSyy5gK6H4ME-7hq0SVeycSRk85HoZ5jKoq4/edit?usp=sharing

Research and Script:

Acting for animation WORKSHOP (26th Oct):

We were asked to walk around with different energy level and sketch the movements of each level:

Level 1: Dead/unconcious

Level 2: Drunk/sleepy

Level 3: No emotion/direct

Level 4: Engaging

Level 5: Aware of surrouding

Level 6: Scared/anxiety

Level 7: Anger/tense up

Reflection from class:

The acting class has always been my least favourite class just because I will somehow end up being more cautious about how I act or move. Hence, I never really have a chance to observe the movements of others properly nor myself either since I never had the chance to look at myself in the mirror in the acting room.

I didn’t enjoy the class as much because I think we didn’t have a lot of time to sketch the movements out compared to the walking part. Still, I hope that it’ll get better next time.

Life drawing (27th October): Gestures drawing

Reflection from class:

I found the body of the model really challenging to draw as her rib cage is really small compared to the model from last week. Hence, I struggled a lot just to find the beans or to structure the sketches properly.

The class felt really hard but optimistically thinking, it felt more useful than the acting class I had, so I was grateful and happy with the results since I felt like I captured proper movements more this time.

Overall reflection week 5:

It wasn’t an easy week to get through with a lot of information being thrown at me but I tried to keep up with everything and stay positive with the resources I have.

I felt like I have become more adapted to the classes and what the teachers expect us to do, so I believe I would be able to do better next week.