During the morning class Sorcha showed us how to do kinetic typography in After Effects, which is animating text, which is also a term I came across when researching animation-related jobs for the start of my Professional Practice blog.

During the afternoon class Alec gave us some animation exercises to understand things such as the graph editor to adjust animations, having anticipation before the action is performed by holding the pose so the audience knows what action is about to be performed, and having the body move in arcs rather than straight from point A to point B. I showed Alec the issue I was having with being unable to move the IK keys in the dope sheet and he said I needed to go into the dope sheet and tick the hierarchy below option in the list tab so that those keys would be included when moving keys in the dope sheet for the timing.

The playblast for the blocking of the weight animation is shown below:

Although there were some limitations with regards to how extreme I could make each pulling pose due to the arms only being able to be pulled a certain amount before the hands were pulled along with them, I think the animation is coming along quite nicely so far. I’ve learned from my collapse animation from last year that the falling motion needed to go by a lot faster, and this is what I made sure to include in the weight animation at the end. The collapse animation from last year I used as a reference to learn from is shown below:

When moving the keyframes for the blocking stage of the weight animation, I made sure to include some anticipation like we were shown in one of the exercises by holding some of the poses for at least 6 frames before showing each attempt at pulling the sword as well as showing her pausing in order to catch her breath from the effort of pulling. For the first and second attempts, the second attempt at pulling is more extreme than the first so she would be more slumped over when catching her breath afterwards and would pause for a longer duration of 12 frames rather than 6 to show the audience she used more of her strength for the second attempt and is therefore more exhausted compared to the first attempt because of it.

For the final attempt I had her appearing completely fed up with her lack of progress and is now propping herself against the rock to use her feet to give herself an extra push while she is pulling in the hopes the sword will come out, and after a couple seconds the sword suddenly plops out and she is flung through the air from the force of the momentum she gained when she was pulling the sword while her feet were pushing her as the sword is no longer stuck in the rock and keeping her in place, so there’s nothing stopping her from travelling backwards from the force she used to pull out the sword and she drops the sword in midair in shock at being flung backwards.

After working on moving the keyframes for the blocking stage of the weight animation, Alec came over to see what I was working on and I took this opportunity to show him the walk cycle animations and lip sync animation I made over the summer. He mentioned generally that in the walk cycles the foot is rotated too far back in some of the frames and looks unnatural as a result as it looks more like a horse’s hoof rather than a human foot from the way it’s rotated, as well as making sure the arms aren’t moving too straight as they would normally move in front of the body rather than remaining beside the body in a straight line.

For the walk and wave he said that the shoulder should move during the wave as in the animation it looks like it’s just the elbow that’s moving which would be very hard for someone to do in real life as the shoulder would be what normally moves the arm during the wave rather than the elbow. He noted that the movements of the tired walk with the body being slumped over the way it is as well as the sideways movements of the happy walk were a bit extreme, but I explained the movements are meant to be exaggerated to properly show off the feelings of each walk so the extreme expressive movements were intentional and aren’t something I’m planning on changing.

Regarding the anxious walk, he felt it conveyed more of an angry walk as shown by what looks to be the stomping feet (due to how fast the walk is because it goes across fewer frames) and folded arms (which were meant to show her hugging herself and gripping to her purse anxiously as she walked), so in my modifications to the walk cycle animations the anxious walk will become the new angry walk by adjusting the arms to make them look folded in anger properly, with the anxious walk and the original angry walk being scrapped altogether. For the sad walk he noted that the feet should be more of a shuffle rather than a proper walk to convey the sadness properly as people who are sad would have shorter gaps between each step compared to the gaps in the other walk cycles. Finally for the lip sync test he said the head movements are too straight and unnatural and should be going in an arc as shown by one of the exercises in class, and that we’ll be going over lip sync in semester 2 anyway so it’s not crucial I have the lip sync perfect right away but that the lip sync was good practice I’ve done over the summer.

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