During week 6, we had our individual interviews to see how we were getting on with our course – to that I explained that I was generally running a little bit behind, largely due to my ADHD making it a bit difficult for me to complete work sometimes, but overall managing.
Additionally, after having finished my first bit of coursework for 3D Digital Literacy, I was feeling a bit more confident.
As for this week, though, in this class we learnt a little bit about the fundamentals of animation, including the 12 principles of animation.
These twelve principles are helpful to keep in mind while animating as they’re techniques that tend to make animations look a lot smoother and nicer-looking. It can be difficult to translate real-life movements into animations, however these principles help in terms of making things look “right”, leading to a generally more pleasant viewing experience.
For example, anticipation gives the viewers more time to process what’s going to happen, staging helps communicate what’s most important in the scene, and squash and stretch adds more exaggeration to your drawings – all of these help with making movement clear, while as the same time making animation a unique medium for storytelling.
In terms of classwork, we were given a few simple animation exercises to do in Krita. I had had previous experience creating drawn 2D animations, however I had never done it in Krita before, so the workspace took a bit of time to get used to. However, thankfully, even though Krita can tend to be a little glitchy sometimes, I did manage to get on with the animation exercises alright.
The first one was just a simple task of duplicating over the circle shape and making it move side to side. It looks very computer-made and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of life in it.
The second one is a little nicer-looking – the timing is different, with a lot of frames gathered together at the start and end, and fewer frames in between, making the ball ease into the movement at the start, and ease out of it afterwards.
And finally, in the third one, I stretched the ball in the middle to better give off the impression of movement. In hindsight, I think I made it stretch just a little too much, and it might also have benefitted from a bit of anticipation beforehand.
Finally, we did the classic exercise of animating a ball bounce. I followed along with some guidelines, and I generally like how my animation turned out!
I think however that I could have reduced the squash of the ball a little bit, as it almost seemed to get larger at that point, and I could have also duplicated the ball a bit more to keep the size more consistent in general.
After doing these practice animations, we got together with our groups and started talking a little more about our characters. I decided to create a joint online drawing board for us to more easily be able to visually communicate our ideas with each other.
Joyce sketched out some bases for us to draw on top of, and while discussing the designs, we all collaborated to polish up the designs together. I mostly worked on the demon, focusing on the face, horns, ears and hair. I also drew the little wings for his cat!
The designs weren’t yet fully set in stone so we were also doing our own little character concept ideas at the side. I liked the idea of the human having blue streaks in his hair, since we were all discussing this character being blue and white coded to contrast the demon being red and black coded. I liked the idea of lighter/whiter sleeved underneath a sweater vest, for example.
Previous concept art of the human showed him with paler skin, which is why it was noted here, but since we were still deciding things I was still experimenting around with the exact character design, which is why I drew him a little differently.
As well as that, since the demon is red and black coded, we experimented with the idea of him having black and red hair. We also experimented with him having more of a casual teenager vibe to him along with that, since previously a lot of the group were thinking up more prim and proper designs, with him in a suit and tie. We explored the idea of him being more formal at the beginning, and learning to loosen up a bit as he interacted with the human more.
Overall, I’m really glad I thought of the whiteboard idea because honestly, it was incredibly fun drawing together with everyone and sharing our ideas like that! I think it definitely helped in terms of communication as well, and I feel like this is the point where we really started being on the same page a little bit more, and where we managed to get the ball rolling in terms of our project.
As for the homework, we were asked to animate 3 or more bouncing balls of different weights – some examples given were a tennis ball, a ping pong ball, and a bowling ball, so I decided to go with those.
I started off with the tennis ball, and after looking at this reference video, I figured I should definitely try to emphasise the squash and stretch because tennis balls tend to be rather soft. I also wanted to emphasise the bounciness of it, since I know myself that those things can bounce incredibly high!
I started off just trying to set some key poses, like for the height of the ball bouncing, and the squash when it goes down. I also tried to make the ball squish a bit less as it lost momentum and wouldn’t be pressing down against the ground as hard.
This was a quick test just to get a rough idea of what I wanted for the animation.
I added frames in between, also adding a bit of stretch to the ball as it was coming down to the ground and coming up from it so that it seemed softer and had a better flow to it. I also decided to space the frames equally so that this animation played on twos.
This was the final animation, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out – I think it turned out pretty bouncy and I’m definitely more happy with it than the ball bounce I did in class. I think I was able to maintain a more consistent shape this time around as well.
Next was the ping pong ball, and I used this reference video to help:
Ping pong balls are very light but also very solid, they don’t really squish much at all. I’d still want to include a little bit of squash and stretch, but likely keep it minimal this time. As well as that, ping pong balls are incredibly light and quickly lose the height they have at the beginning when thrown.
So in this animation, I decided to space out the frames a little more, so that the ping pong ball felt lighter. I also gave it three frames in the air at first, and then as it lost momentum I made it stay only two frames in the air until the end where it was just small little hops, and I made it roll a bit. I’m actually very happy with how this turned out!
Finally, I wanted to try animating a bowling ball, and I tried to reference this video:
I noted that the bowling ball doesn’t bounce much at all, only a few times before settling down. As well as that I wanted to keep the shape more consistent and solid this time to show how hard and heavy the object is.
I decided to use the circle tool this time, again to keep the shape more consistent and more solid. As you can see, this animation is shorter than the ping pong ball or the tennis ball, due to the bowling ball not bouncing much.
I did add a small amount of squash to the bowling ball as it landed, but only a tiny bit so it wouldn’t be too noticeable. I generally think this turned out pretty well and I conveyed the idea of this being a bowling ball and not a different kind.
Looking back at all of these together, I think I like the bowling ball animation, I’m happiest with the ping pong ball animation, and I’m relatively happy with the tennis ball animation, however it feels a little slow to me. If I were to redo it, I think I would have less frames when it was bouncing to better convey the speed it was going at!
We were also asked to read through Chapter 4 from the Animator’s Survival Kit – I actually have this book, so I recognise this chapter, however I decided to read through it again to refresh my knowledge. The chapter talked about timing and spacing, in-betweens and animating straight ahead vs pose-to-pose, among other things.
Richard Williams described that often it’s best to use a combination of both straight ahead and pose-to-pose animation, in order to have that combination of planning the scene out correctly but also having a better “flow” to your animation, and making it feel more life-like. I took note of the advice, as it would definitely be helpful for when I’d be doing my animation for my group work.
As well as that, in order to practice the 12 principles of animation, I decided to do this small animation practice with a ball that explored them all in one go.
This was originally supposed to be a quick little practice thing but then I kept going with it and thinking of new things that would work with each prompt and it turned into a whole story!
I’m actually really happy with how it turned out though, although I think I might like to redo it sometime and polish it up, just for myself really, as I generally really like it but I’d like to figure out a way to make it a bit better timed so that you have more time to actually read the writing on the screen.
I generally think that it was pretty creative in some ways though, and I especially like how I animated the ball landing, the dragon, the ball going into the A for Anticipation, and the “Thank You For Watching!” coming in at the end!
Finally, I did a bit of character sketching in order to get a better feel for the characters!
Joyce had done some drawings for the characters to polish up the designs so I decided to base my sketches off of those!
We had basically decided on a set design for the demon at this point, so I had a go at drawing him in a suit and in his more casual outfit as well, as well as drawing some expressions for him! I genuinely really like this design and I think he’s very fun to draw.
The human’s design wasn’t fully set in stone yet, so what I drew was my personal interpretation of the character. He was honestly really fun to draw as well and I experimented with some new paints that I had gotten!
The group ended up deciding to stick closer to the original design, but the hoodie was made a bit bluer, and his eyes were made green as well, to contrast the demon’s red colour.
All in all I learnt a lot this week and was able to refresh my knowledge on the basic animation principles, which made me feel a lot more prepared to face the coursework I would have to do. It was nice because this was really the point where it started to feel like things were kicking off. I felt more confident about the group project and I was very excited to see where it would lead!