Animation 10: Block Interaction

Nov 4, 2016 This week's brief was far more lenient in terms of what our brief was. Was finally time to add charcter to the principles we had been researching and trying to succefully emulate. I decided that to pay homage to the original cartoons of the 30's and 40's Tom and Jerry/ Looney Tunes, etc. I would make a cartoon that had a similar pantomine style of humour and pacing.

Before drawing out a bar sheet, I first had to draw up a storyboard (a script of pictures)

I then tried to calculate a good bar sheet here.

(UPDATE* clearer and more concise version of my Block interaction below.)

Bearing all of my preparation in mind, I began animating, this is what I ended up with. I was very pleased with the results, using elements of all animation exercises I had done so far. Things like using blue tack and follow through action on most of my shots is what makes the animation a lot more life like and ACTUALLY animated.

I really wanted to push myself and so I had made an attempt at doing the same sequence in Maya. I started off by placing two objects into the scene and copied out the same movements that appeared in the stop motion video into the Maya keyframes.

This involved me changing the pivot points on the blocks so I could effectively tilt the blocks accordingly. Using the 4 way perspective view, really aided me in this process.

I then edited the tangents on the graph editor so that I could create more authentic movements. In this case there were many examples of the blocks easing in and out of their movements.

I was quite pleased with my final result, as I feel it really captured the essence of the stop motion and it really forced me to get stuck in with Maya, a program I am always intimidated by.

Maya really helped me to consolidate what I had learned through stop-motion as I was able to dissect the movements more by going back and editing certain parts that would have been impossible in StopMo Pro. Stop motion is becoming far more enjoyable as we are allowed more creative freedoms as artists, I think this is what our lecturers intended in the first place. It is only through self-taught discipline that we can ever actually begin to progress with our animation skills, especially with a medium as patience-requiring and time-consuming as stop- motion.