This is a research blog about the work for the project advanced animation skills workshop. The project is designed to improve on my core animation skills and understand in further detail the technical processes of animation. This is part of the BA Animation course I am currently studying for at Middlesex University, London.
The project spanned 6 weeks, which included quadruped locomotion, the illusion of weight shown through three exercises (push, pull and lift) and an obstacle course.
Through the blog I will present my progress throughout the project, showing the final animations and the references and sketches that helped me to understand and improve upon the animation principles.
In the first brief we were given we had to animate a quadruped of our choice. I choose to animate a horse I found this to be the hardest of all the exercises I really struggled to get the basic movement right when I first started to draw the sequence.
For the first part of the project we drew a monkey skeleton from a model skeleton
On the left is the full monkey skeleton and on the right is a leg from a dog skeleton.
This was my first attempt at animating the horse I found it really hard to get the movement right looking at references from youtube. I then looked at the book The Animator’s Survival Kit by Richard Williams pages 356 – 359 really helped me to understand the movement better. I also found the video below from youtube, which really helped me discern the leg and joint movement.
I then started from scratch and kept it really simple just by drawing stick legs to begin with to make sure I got the movement correct.
From this I then started to build up the shape of the horse.
From that I was able to finish both the walk cycle and run cycle (just legs) relatively quickly. However in hindsight I should have added the head and body as I went rather than at the end because it made it a lot harder having to go back and redraw frames.
What also didn’t help was that I didn’t is that I did both the walk and run cycle on separate files so when it came to doing the in-between running and walking it was difficult because the horse had changed shape.
I found adding the head and tail very hard because the proportion of the horse was entirely wrong. However I found a really good stopping reference on youtube that helped me see the motion really clearly. But I felt like I rushed the stop and it could be refined more as it still feels like it doesn’t put enough pressure on the floor when it stops
Below is the final full horse animation
It still needs refining the head movement needs to be more exaggerated and the general shape of the horse varies a lot. The in-between and stop also needed a bit more work but overall I’m pleased with the outcome of the animation.
In the second brief the key point was to show the illusion of weight in three different exercises. At first I animated straight ahead which meant I animated frame-by-frame one after each other however I found this very difficult. I then changed to the pose-to-pose technique in which I animated by drawing key frames and then in-betweened them.
Push
After the crit I fixed the head as before it wobbled to much. Overall it works quite well especially after I animated it using the pose-to-pose technique.
I used kyle’s push video as reference:
Pull
I think this exercise needs slight refinement I feel like the figure needs to make more steps and the fall isn’t perfect. However I feel like it adequately shows that the stick figure is pulling a heavy object .. or dog.
I used my pull video as reference:
Lift
When I first started this exercise I was using the straight ahead technique and I found to keep the stick figure a consistent size. However I changed to pose-to-pose and the outcome I think is quite successful.
I again used my video of me lifting a box as reference:
I based my obstacle course on the hare and the tortoise, however I was a little to ambitious trying to animate both characters and it took me longer than if I had done one simple stick figure. I love the final design of the obstacle course however I think the animation isn’t good enough.
A few small sketches when I was deciding the design for the hare.
And the final Animation:
Some of the quality is lost due to the gif formatting.
I feel after this project I have grasped a much better understanding of some of the main principles of animation. I feel a lot more confidence in my animation in comparison to last year. It has also helped me to improve upon my technological skills I’ve found a lot of new effects and techniques on photoshop.
Horse – I feel that the horse could have been improved further if I had more time to tweak the head movement. I also realised that I shouldn’t draw the head and other important features after having doing all the other leg and body movement, it just meant extra work that could have been avoided had I drawn the whole horse from the start.
Push – Overall I think the animation itself is quite successful however had I had more time I think I would have had the figure start from standing.
Pull – I think this still needs quite a lot of work the figure needs to actually step and pull the rope.
Lift – The character size did start to vary and I did have to edit a few of the frames as the character got to tall. I found it hard to keep the box size consistent especially as the perspective would often change.
Obstacle Course –I love the overall design of the course and I wish I had made the obstacles a little more dynamic because there isn’t really any challenging obstacles. I think the animation itself was too rushed and doesn’t look very finished. A few sections need in-betweens and the lines are sometimes a bit too jumpy.
The video below is contains all of the animations from all the different briefs that I uploaded onto youtube.
Advanced Animation Skills 