Monday 18 July 2011

Week 10

LAB 1: Exercise 1 and 2



Squash and Stretch: 
The purpose of which is to give a sense of weight and flexibility to objects. In this video of me squatting and jumping, it is as though I am squashed (when squatting) and stretched (when jumping up). It gives a sense of exaggeration to make the action more interesting.

Anticipation:
Anticipation is used to prepare the audience for an action, and to make the action appear more realistic. In this video of me jumping, I squat before my jump. This prepares the audience, which will then anticipate my jump.


Follow through and overlapping action:
Nothing stops all at once. After my jump, when I just landed, my body stops moving but my hair continues to catch up and only comes to a stop after a while.


Staging:
It is clear that I am the main focus of this video as the audience's attention will be directed to the centre of the screen. The background and surrounding are simple and do not distract the audience from my actions.


LAB 1: Exercise 3


Spongebob is a character made of sponge. This makes him flexible, which means he has a great SQUASH AND STRETCH factor. This can be seen from 00:25 when he is tied up in the rope, his features and body are squashed.

At 00:27, Mr Krabs pulls on the rope, which makes the audience ANTICIPATE a following action, which is the dropping down of spongebob. The rope seems to be of an elastic material such as rubber as it STRETCHES when Mr Krabs pulls on it.

From 00:10 to 00:14, Spongebob is seen skipping and swinging his arms. The motion of his arms are in the path of ARCS.

When Mr Krabs walk at 1:22, his legs move really fast, this is a SECONDARY ACTION to enrich his walking. It emphasises his form as a crab and gives the action a sense of urgency.

The thing I love about cartoons, especially Spongebob Squarepants, is that they make use of alot of EXAGGERATION. This is especially evident in facial expressions. It gives the cartoon character a sense of humour and appeal.

Spongebob APPEALS to the audience(children) as he is cute and funny. His facial expressions and actions shape up his character as a 'comedian' and protagonist as the show.

My thoughts:

This exercise taught me to observe animation more closely. Before this, it never did occur to me that there are so many principles of animation that viewers tend to overlook. It amazes me that in animations, even those of cartoons that are targeted towards young children, even tiny details obey many animation principles.


LAB 2:


 This is the bouncing beach ball animation I did using Pencil. I had to watch several videos which taught me how to go about animating a ball. Since a beach ball is lighter and softer as compared to other solid balls such as bowling ball or golf ball, the squash and stretch factor is much higher. Hence, the squashing and stretching is alot more obvious and it is more bouncy.



This is a video on Youtube that explains the animation of a bouncing ball in detail and covers many important aspects such as spacing. is really helpful if I want to animate a bouncing ball more realistically in the future.



 This is the animation of the bowling ball I have done using Pencil.


My thoughts:

This is my first time creating an animation using Pencil software. It is somehow easy to use, but can be quite frustrating as I can only see the image of the previous keyframe and not all of them. The bouncing ball the basic of animation and a place to start, but much more can be improved on my animation in terms of better timing and velocity of the ball.




This is the animation I have done of the jumping action using Pencil.

LAB 2: Exercise 2

1. What is ease-in ease-out in reference to animation?

It is the variation of the spacing between the images between keyframes. A larger spacing will make the motion of the object appear faster and quicker, while a smaller spacing will make it appear slower. This is an important aspect to consider when it comes to animation, as it makes the movement of an object more realistic and convincing.

2. What does frames-per-second mean?

It refers to the number of frames displayed a second. More frames are used per second when a smooth animation is to be achieved. The principle of it is somehow similar to that of ease-in ease-out, whereby many of the same frames are used to portray a slower motion.

3. The spacing of the ticks in the animation chart below is for an object bouncing with linear speed over 12 frames - draw a similar chart, but with ease-in and ease-out.

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