This week we looked at Storyboarding in more detail and more animating but with form this time. The animation task was to animate a Flour Sack in some sort of action of our chosing. With this practice we are also to be aware of our ‘key poses’ and ‘in-betweens’. I’m not the best at animating so I decided to try something simple that wouldn’t require a lot of drawing to do. And so the idea of doing some spins sounded ideal due to the idea of being able to copy and paste frames a lot so it is less work. My frame rate is 12 per second this time compared to the 24 frames per second last week.

I started off on 2’s for the inital twirl, but it wasn’t very exciting so I decided to speed it up a bit, therefore I switched to 1’s for the fast motion section. This then gave me the idea to have a slow down section at the end and have the sack fall out of dizziness. So after the fast spin I then went into 3’s and even a bit longer coming up to the fall. I really think that this combination of speeds really add to the animation and make it more interesting to the viewer. Plus, practicing different speeds is very valuable to my skills. Below is the completed animation.

Flour Sack Animation:

The only thing I can think of to make this look better would probably add so stars circling the head of the flour sack to show the viewer that the sack is indeed dizzy and that is why it falls. I think I need to work on doing more checks of my work to see if anything needs modified to get the best effect possible.

The images below show my ‘Key Poses’ that I wanted to work around. From looking at these key poses you already get a sense of how the animation is going to look which I think is the purpose of key poses.

Key Frames:

As I mentioned, we went into further detail about storyboards, what they contain, what they are about, and the do’s and don’t’s of storyboarding (which was the most interesting part to me).

First Storyboard Idea:

This is a storyboard that I tried out last week and it was mentioned that I need to make things a bit more clearer in some parts and some people where confused as to what was going on. My explainations do need a bit more work. And so from learing more about storyboards this week, I tried putting that knowledge and advice into practice and created some more detailed storyboards. I don’t think storyboards need to be detailed but doing it this way helps a little figure things out, for example, what may be hard to animate and what will not be difficult.

During the making of these, there were spots that didn’t look quite right and so I drew the corrected bit beside it. I did need to make a change with frame 6 as I realised that it has a similar camera view to frames 4 and 5 and that wasn’t going to work so I changed to a more frontal view of the feet to give more variety at that part.

Improved Storyboards:

I really like these storyboard, though going to need to work on my details on characters and environments that are smaller in the box. I guess the next step would be to add some colour into these and get prepared for an animatic that the group will need to do.

Oh, my group, I am so glad I joined this group, we all seem to be in sync with each other with this work and we all get along which is nice. I have yet to be uncomfortable, I’m hoping that things will stay this way for a while.