With the sketches and the reference videos that I took last week, I started animating the dog walking cycle first.
With the first result, I wasn’t satisfied with how the dog’s head looked a bit off and how the shoulders keep overlapping one another, confusing me on which is which, so I made the second version.
This time I made sure to colour the arm and leg behind the body to not confuse the audience.
After I’m satisfied with the result, I then moved on to the run cycle.
I wanted to challenge myself with the run cycle so I decided to animate a leopard running cycle. I then added the colour for greater visual experience.
The frame that I need to draw is significantly lower than the walk cycle, so I finished animating it rather quickly although I found the long tail somewhat hard to do because I’m still not that familiar with follow-through animation.
Reflection from class:
It was quite a challenging exercise at first because I’m not familiar with animating fIt was quite a challenging exercise at first because I’m not familiar with animating four-legged animals so it took me a long time to familiarise myself with animating the dog and the leopard.
I made more research about how to animate quadruped animal including I made more research about how to animate quadruped animals including watching multiple youtube tutorials and observing how dogs walk when I encounter them in real life. Therefore, this exercise has made me more attentive to observing movements in real life.
I gained a lot of confidence from doing the exercise and look forward to animating more animals for my animation journey shortly.
Stop motion TECHNICAL WORKSHOP (22nd Nov):
We were tasked to write a story and filmed it using our puppets.
My friend and I both have characters that fit the theme of horror, so we wrote a story about Malory (The duck) that met with a mysterious box named Di-dink and fought with a headless Yeti, Chupacabra.
We made our own filming set under the table due to the unavailability of the shooting area so my teammate and I needed to bend our backs the whole shooting to fit under the table.
During the process, one of my characters; Di-Ding, has problems standing up due to its’ wire legs being uneven in addition to the software that kept on crashing, delaying the whole filming process a lot.
In the end, to save time, we decided to cut most of the scenes because we couldn’t film them on time. Hence, we only have the trailer to show at the end of the day.
I took the role of an editor while my friend took the role of script writer.
Reflection:
This exercise has killed a part of my passion for stop-motion animation due to the complicated filming process. However, I’ve learnt the hard way that I should have booked the stop-motion area before joining the class and been more careful with the team’s time management.
I’ve learnt the technique of moving the background instead of the character to create the illusion that the character is moving and play with the camera angle to make the Chupacabra appears bigger.
At the end of the day, I’m proud of what my team have made because it’s more entertaining than I thought although it’s just a mere trailer.
Life drawing (1st of Dec): Gestures drawing
Reflection from class:
It was challenging drawing the model’s body because the complicated pose are foreshortening. Hence, it wasn’t obvious for me to find the ‘bean’ and draw the connection between the body part of the model without confusing myself.
However, thanks to all the complicated poses, I feel like I had the chance to push my ability and try using more 3D shapes to help me navigate through each drawing. Therefore, I enjoyed the session and hope I can improve even more next week.
Overall reflection week 10:
This week has been tough because I’m preparing for the submission while also keeping up with the work in class. However, I could see my improvement in animating the Quadruped walk and run cycle, so I’m content with what I’ve been doing so far.
I personally would like to explore puppet making more during my upcoming holiday since I’ve taken interest in it and because I felt like I could have done a better job with animating it to make the whole animation smoother.