AM Part III - Pendulum and Tailor

These are two different assignments that were done over two weeks but they cover the same basic principles: overlap and follow-through. 

The first assignment involved a pendulum. My task was to simulate the effects of moving one at it's base by showing the ball dragging behind and then continuing it's momentum even after the base has stopped. The hardest task was making the stiff bamboo-looking model appear to be as loose as a chain. I'm not sure as to how successful I was.

AM Part II - Bouncing Ball

So obviously we didn't just make sketches and pose figures the whole time; that was just a small part of the class but not the focus.

The focus of the class was introducing us to animation through a bouncing ball. This is a common exercise that most books on animation will use to introduce the 12 basic principles of animation through the break down of a bouncing ball. So after a lecture outlining those principles and a quick session with Mark further clarifying, I was ready to do my first bit of animation. As would become standard practice, I got video reference of and mapped out what I was about to do on paper before I even got into the computer (planning becomes increasingly important as animations become more complex).

AM Part I - Basic Foundations

Alright, I'm going to take you through my entire Animation Mentor experience one blog post at a time, starting at the beginning.

Class 1 was called Basic Foundations and my mentor was Mark Pudleiner. It was his job to supply us with a solid foundation from which everything would be built. First task, make quick gesture drawings of people around you. What was the point of this? To capture motion and emotion through body posture. We were then given a basic character model called Stu to which we used to match the drawing. This served a dual purpose; to introduce us to a CG character model while also teaching us the basics of posing (such as weight, balance, clear silhouettes, extremes, twinning, etc.).