Weak Animation

[pasithea]

Well. I finished the pencil-test of that Yerf SeSa animation. I'm kinda disappointed with it.

I haven't really got the feel for animating on 1's yet. I had to drop my frame rate to 18FPS to get it sort of in the right time so I'm off by 1/4th. I did decide though that I should be doing a lot more animation on 1s than I have been (I tend to animate mostly on 2s) This test is all first-time through of the animation, I haven't corrected anything (mostly because this isn't a project I was really into so I don't want to spend a huge amount of time cleaning it up) The pounce is pretty floaty. I think either she needed to travel a greater distance across the screen or higher into the air. In general, my keys could be stronger and my animation more exaggerated. I forgot the rule I'd set for myself of doubling what I felt was 'exagerated' and using my first drawing of a key as the middle inbetween.

On the other hand, I think I did a better job overlapping motion and smoother transistions into/out of holds, so it's not all bad. I think the head turns are working reasonably well and I'm actually rather happy with the hop up at the end. That is definetely a motion that I would not have tried a year ago or if I had, I would have struggled with it a LOT more. I'm still finding that I sometimes forget I can move the character in 3D space on the paper but I'm getting better at it and it's coming a lot more easily. Sharper keys, more exagerated motion, better timing, continue working on overlap and character design. Anything else?

Anyhow, I hadn't done much drawing at all the past 2 or 3 months, so it was nice to see that I hadn't completely backslid on what I'd learned. Also, if I think of it in the sense that I didn't do any cleanup and this is a first pass, I can feel pretty pleased about this animation. I think after dinner I'm gonna do some more sort of loosening up stuff. Maybe floursacks or something.

If you're interested. Here's the animation I'm babbling on about. It's a 700K quicktime movie (MPEG 4 codec, Quicktime 6) http://circle.twu.net/animate/pencil/kytha_web.mov Critique always welcome.

Comments

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

Hmm, you're right. A double-take would work a lot better. I always forget I can do those. There should probably also be better effects animation on the object to draw attention to it too. Thanks for the advce! ^_^

[doctorpinkerton.livejournal.com]

Oh, you're right, I forgot to mention that too. My eye didn't even catch the glint coming off the shiny object until after she picked it up... but then, when I went back and looked at it again, I figured that would be fixed in the inking stage.