Weight Lift

Beginning this assignment, I first thought of Irish lifting stones as potentially a good example and looked to YouTube for references as that was where I first heard of Stonelifting. There is a surprising amount of videos and channels dedicated this niche hobby so I didn’t have to dig for references. I started with this video and sketched the key poses in ToonBoom. It almost goes without saying that I have chosen to use 2D for this assignment as I will only use 3D when I have to.

I didn’t progress any further on this assignment until after I had completed my character creation module. When I returned to these keyframes to start another pass I realised the feet where not planted and I would have to restart. Instead of restarting with the same reference I wondered if I could find some references of people lifting something a little more interesting than a big stone (I doubt there are any avid stone lifters reading this to be offended)

I thought it would be fun to animate someone lifting a large dog but surprisingly this was harder to find references for. After a little searching I found a few videos I could use together. At this point I had just under a week left and still most of my lip sync to do as well so I decided to rotoscope the key poses this time, based on this reference, to save some time and make sure I didn’t repeat mistakes from my last attempt.

From here I animated my first (and only full pass I had time for) mostly straight ahead as I could be confident my keyframes would keep me right. I found this process quite straightforward despite it being my first time animating with ToonBoom.  There are probably a lot of shortcuts I could have used to save time but while I’m new to the software I just drew each new frame individually as I didn’t know how to copy elements of one frame into another etc. This is usually how I prefer to work anyway as I just prefer how it looks. I chose not to include my character’s face and instead add more detail to the dog as I tend to overthink and spend too long drawing and redrawing human faces, and I had plenty of that to look forward to in my lip sync. With the dog being a living thing I took the opportunity to add some fluidity, extra expressions and follow through to the head, neck and floppy ear as this was a time efficient way to add more flair to my animation. I also exaggerated the anticipation of my character lifting the dog as in the reference it is obvious the dog is actually not very heavy, just large and I wanted to make my animation look more like the examples I had seen in class. After drawing all my frames I found it didn’t take long in ToonBoom to adjust the timing without having to add more drawings. I found that after animating straight ahead the dogs head was the only thing that morphed over the course of the animation, starting off smaller and narrower and growing slightly larger by the end. This is not so noticeable in my final product as I was able to go over it when adding finishing touches without spending too much time being meticulous.

I think my final weight animation lift looks good although if I could do it again I would have liked to further exaggerate the follow through after the character lifts the dog, as I feel I only made it noticeable by the dog’s head rather than the weight of their whole body. I would also have liked to add more follow through to dog’s tail and fur and the character’s hair. I also would have liked to add more frames in general as I didn’t strictly animate on 2s or 3s and instead just added drawings where it felt essential. As well as the rotoscoping of the key frames I think this contributes to my final result looking more rigid and simple than if I had had time to work from scratch.  Although I like how the dog turned out and it was much more enjoyable than just drawing a rock, I would have had to focus more on my character if they were lifting a very simple object. Initially I was worried going into this assignment without having done part 1 of the module and hence having no previous experience with ToonBoom. I was expecting a first time using a new 2D animation program to be tedious, as I found animating in Krita last year to be an annoyance, but it was not nearly as difficult as I imagined. I think this is also largely thanks to upgrading to a display tablet which has so far made all digital art in general feel significantly more intuitive. Overall, given the tight schedule I had to complete this animation within and my inexperience with ToonBoom I think my final result is satisfactory.