Changes

Scene 33 has been changed. And while the difference is slight, the dynamic of the scene has changed. This kind of change is one of the difficult things about animating in any medium: when a scene changes a good deal after its been started, its gets harder and harder to make "little changes". This happens with traditional animation as well, but more often you have to re-draw the entire scene with any change. With animation programs that contain a graph editor ( Autodesk Maya, Tv Paint, any animation program worth its salt...)you do have some wiggle room to adjust a slow-in here or some overlapping action there. For me, one of the difficult things to learn in 3d was how to cope with this type of change. So it was paramount to learn....STEPPED ANIMATION/CURVES!!

What is stepped animation, you ask? Also known as 'stepped curves' in 3d, instead of adding all the curves ( i.e. making the characters movements smooth), you only show the major poses. It is a direct decendent to the way traditional animators roughed out their scenes. It ends up looking 'choppy' or 'robotic', but again, the idea is to keep things simple so that if the director doesnt like it, you can 'redraw' your poses quickly.

However, some directors have trouble "seeing" the animation based on stepped animation alone, and will only 'get' the acting when its smoothed. Which can cause you, the animator, a world of grief. This is because 'smooth' animation takes a long time to produce. Keeping your animation in 'stepped' as long as possible ensures flexibility and your sanity! But in the off chance that you end up having to present your rough animation in curves, there's still hope. Instead of spending all your time getting every movement perfect, concentrate on the most important movements. For example, if your character is falling thru the air, dont spend your time on how tight their eyes will be closed as they plummet to their doom! The primary action is falling. So key a pose at the top and bottom of the fall. If you want, you can turn your curves to 'linear' so it actually looks as if he's floating down. How fast the character appears to fall is based on how long it takes to get from pose 'a' ot pose 'b'. Fast fall= less time between 'a' and 'b'. Slo-motion fall=MUCH more time between 'a' and 'b'.

the mysterious scene33!!!

Well, this scene is being changed as I animate it, but such is production! I definately liked this version better, but in the end, the closeup wins out. Ill post that one later. I think the great thing now is that I can get a scene roughed out in a day or two now, depending of course on how long the scene is. At the beginning of this film, it would take FOREVER!

Shark Week?

Hmm, Shark Week. So Im late jumping on the band wagon. I was inspired today to do some animation surrounding Discovery Channel's Shark Week. I didnt want to take it all the way, but hopefully, someone besides me will get a kick out of this. This is why i love traditional animation so much: you can do it on the fly. All you need a pencil and some imagination....wow, that sounded really corny, even coming from me.

[EDIT] I was told by a friend that the animation wasnt looping. So I re-posted it. But it took longer than I thought, as Blogger no longer accepts dot gifs as a file format. Lame..