For this week’s class, we covered the storyboarding basics and two more animation principles; staging and anticipation.

Staging is very important when animating as it is used to ensure that every action is understood and clear. There are a few different areas of staging that you need to understand when setting up a scene.

The first is actions. When setting up a scene, your main object should be the focus and should not be overshadowed by anything in the background or foreground. This also applies with timing and camera, nothing should be fighting for attention but instead should flow naturally. This means that when timing, ensure that it isn’t all at once or out of order and for camera, your main focus should be centred or on the opposite side of your character if they are looking at something (unless there is something of importance behind them).

For staging, you should include things that will overly convey what you want the audience to understand about the character or setting. This means that you should remove things that are unimportant to a scene and instead exaggerate things that are.

Anticipation is the preparation of a movement, e.g. A crouch before a jump. This lets the audience know what the next action will be before it actually happens.

By using anticipation, you can make your animation appear lively and interesting. Without anticipation your animation will appear dull and unmotivated. 

 

During class, we completed some exercises. The first was to draw a spread of flour sacks to get us used to its form, we then would animate a flour sack jumping; making sure to make use of staging and anticipation.

We then moved onto some storyboarding exercises to prepare us for our own storyboards. We continued with the flourbag theme and filled out a storyboard template, making sure to stick to the scene directions. I found this exercise quite fun to complete and feel that I filled it in correctly for the most part. 

For our homework this week, we were tasked with creating our storyboards for our part in the group animation. I tried to showcase the characters personalities  as they are the main focus of the animation.