It's our intern's one month anniversary at Smiley Guys!
This week has been exciting for me. I received 3 big shots from teleporting fat guy to animate. For the first time, there not just 1-3 second long lol. In the scene I had 5 characters to animate; each acting out their own part, also including camera move and close-up. It was really fun being able to do different character performance for each of them.
What struck me for a bit was flipping the characters on flash. Since they're flat characters with no dimensions, the only way to turn their body was to cheat. At first I just flipped them horizontally to see how that goes, and of course it looked very stiff and boring. So I tried playing around by moving them towards the opposite side to give it some anticipation but it still didn't look right. Eventually
I asked Joel for help and he roughly put the character in place and explained to me the subtle things that makes a huge difference in the movement. Turns out it was all in the legs and many other small movements like the head. After his demonstration I was able to animate the next character turning much better. There are just so many things in flash I learned that made animating so much more fun and interesting.
One thing in particular I recently started doing was selecting the parts I'm trying to move rather than clicking one part at a time. It helped me save so much time and effort trying to move a character. Even animating the dad jar gave me the opportunity to ask Rich to show me by moving the lid (mouth) layer into the body layer I can move the whole thing without affecting individual parts.
Every time I animate, I get to face new challenges and find new solutions which helps me become a more observant and productive animator over-time.
No comments:
Post a Comment