ball Kick breakdowns

Ball Kick Flip Book

Been catching up on Jason Ryan's qanda's of late. Really trying to soak up as much of his process as possible. Some points ive observed on the flipbook pass:

The flipbook pass is really good for coming up with a scene from scratch.

Before worrying about timing, spend time on discovering poses that communicate the scene and attitude of the character as well as camera angles and composition.

Work in the antics, overlaps, arcs etc when planning. it so much easier to think about these when they're just drawings.

Figuring out eyeline is important at this stage.

Show the thought process.

Think about how the poses will transition to each other. look for the shape change.

This is where you work out the story. solve all the problems of the narrative.

Spend alot of time on the key poses, make sure they express the right attitude.

Before i got to animating this scene, i spent some time thinking about what i was going to do and did a very ruff storyboard. its a bad idea for me to just open fb and start drawing, i dont have any sort of concept and its very hard to formulate a story.

Also, i found the avery style run in mid air thing easier to solve when i combined the legs area into a blob and moved it as one not trying to think about which leg goes where. this stopped me getting confused by the details. instead i had 2 separate components that i could think about in terms of primary and secondary mover.

"I've Been Animated"

august life drawing

Over the last couple of months I have become more aware of the importance 0f angles to represent form more accurately.

observational sketches

cleaned up headturn

head turn

Managed not to languish over this one t00 much. really going for a quick process: understand the action, draw the keys, anticipation, break it down and inbetween. i found doing the keys, antic and breakdowns really rough and quick helpful. Then I cleaned those drawings up a bit thinking about the arcs created by the individual features.

3d practice

I have spent the last couple of months learning 3d software and trying to establish some sort of work flow. I have drawn mainly upon 2 sources, those are Keith Lango and Jason Ryan. I am currently jumping back and forth between the two styles and trying to work out what best suits me.

I have decided to work on a scene as an attempt to apply the knowledge I have been trying to fill in my head with. The first thing I am trying to do is establish the story telling poses of the scene. This was achieved through a combination of thumbnailing and video reference.

Once the main poses were figured out, I timed them out in flipbook.

2d blocking

For the most part I was happy with the flow of the movement and things seemed timed out pretty well. From here I decided to apply some of Keith's process and create the key poses in maya using the stacked method. Here you don't try to time out the scene you just focus on the keys and create them one after the other in the timeline. To flesh out the action I included some breakdowns and eases.

The next step was to time these poses out. I exported these individual frames using monkey shuffle into monkey jam. Now I could plan the timing of the 3d stuff quickly. For the most part I used the timing from the 2d blocking.

3d blocking

The next stage is clean up. I am finding this stage difficult to get my head around. Once the piece is splined out it loses its energy and turns into a mess. I need to control the flow of movement by defining the holds and the easing in and out.

life drawing april

animating with stick figures

I have found some great tutorials on animating using only stick figures. This lets you focus on the movement rather than character proportion and consistency.

thinking about easter