Animation 102: Dynamic Movement (2D Push and Pull)

Mar 24, 2017

Fourth exercise: Dynamics Push & Pull Animation: The exertion of force and struggle from to move object. After my last tutorial from pose to pose animation, I have decided to take some advice from another Alan Becker tutorial on the principle of exaggeration. Through this I hope to make the dynamism in this animation task more transparent.

Taking what I learned in this tutorial into consideration I have recorded a reference video for my push and pull animation. I made sure that my acting in this video was deliberately slapstick and very exaggerated. These were very physical shoots to film but I'm glad that I have acted in this way barbecue it made the referencing for my bar sheet and preliminary animation a lot easier to mark out:

PULL BAR SHEET:

PUSH BAR SHEET:

Much like with my previous tasks, I have managed to create a preliminary animatic-type of animation that I have roughly sketched-out with a mixture of frame by frame and tween animation.

I am pleased that by using these techniques I am becoming a stronger animator. It is helping me to understand proportion. It is becoming a good scaffold for my refined dynamic drawing animation as well. I then began to draw over the scaffold using the same character design from my walk through space animation. Because of my scaffold I could focus on the more refined details of the animation such as appeal within my facial poses and augmentation:

And follow through action on the hair and head.

Motion tweens have also come in handy whilst doing these parts of the animation because unlike stop motion animation, I can just put a moving component of my character onto a new layer and solely edit that part, with out having to be concerned with the rest of the body. For example If I have to edit the head I can animate it using frame by frame whilst if the body requires minimal movement I will just skew the component using a motion tween with a pivot point anchored at the feet.

I am very pleased with my final result, however, I am concerned at how long these tasks are taking me.

I have time to do my story exercise using these techniques but they are exceedingly more and more time-consuming. This task has taken me about four days to complete fully. hopefully if I complete my other modules with good time management, I will be able to complete my story exercise to it's full polished extent. The worst case scenario will be an animatic version of the animation having to be submitted.