Reflection overall:

For the start of this module it was intimidating because things were going so fast it was hard to tell if I had understood anything and would be able to reach the deadline with all four animation done in time. I decided to think ahead, and test out which medium would be easier to use and get to the deadline in time and realised I faced a common issue in 3D animation that I did not in 2D which led to my choice. The main issue was the legs kept on bumping weirdly at the knee, which I found very hard to get rid of and made me feel the animation was imperfect. Eventually I knew it would take me longer to get a hold of it and decided to work with what was faster based on our deadline. I would rather take my time with 3D animation without a set deadline to understand it better.

Although animation is far from being my strong suit or comfort, I see improvement from what I’ve worked on last year and the tests I did over the summer break. The lecturers did a great job at getting us to understand the principles of animations when it comes to the cycles we worked on: Key poses, in between, breaking arms, overlap, silhouette issues and making sure we have arcs.

Feedback from lecturers and my peers in class is something I valued a lot and made sure to always ask for because it helped me step back from my animations and reveal mistakes I couldn’t have found on my own specially in moments when things looked off and I couldn’t tell what was wrong. Getting different perspectives really helped with problem solving, it helped me avoid being stuck on a problem and helped guide me to the solution. I’m glad I don’t shy away anymore from asking for help.

I mostly struggled to understand breaking the arms, silhouettes and arcs. Although the videos the lecturer provided us with and Richard Williams survival kit, I couldn’t wrap my head around how to break the arms until I asked my lecturer in class and he explained it by creating the movement with his arm which reminded me of a ribbon and that stuck with me. It was extremely helpful, but it took some trial and error. While for the silhouettes I’m still struggling to get it right, but I feel if I had more time to restart my cycles, I would have done it differently. Finally for the Arcs I remembered what our lecturer said about using joints to help us with arcs, so I made them visible by drawing circles, it seems simple, but it really helped me visualise them specially with a bright red colour. I feel, for a start I have resolved these issues and I’m quite pleased with the small progress I’ve achieved.

Although we had such a short deadline that felt pressuring, it really helped me organise myself and make wiser decisions on how complex I could go with my animations to challenge myself slightly without causing me to fall behind or hinder me from understanding the principles first I see myself continuing to do these practice walks in 2D to apply this new knowledge I have and redo the work for myself and calmly focus on the 3D at my own pace to get the same amount of confidence I now have in 2D.

Reflection on my animations:

For my vanilla walk cycle and run cycle I feel like I have come to a point where I understand the principles and I am able to apply them to a basic character, keeping in mind the issues I had on this assignment.

As for the walk with personality I feel is where I did the best out of the other three, there’s still room for perfecting but as of now and with our deadline I feel like I did well, I would maybe make the arcs a little more exaggerated next time.

My Run and jump cycle is alright, do feel had I had more time I would have tweaked it a bit more to exaggerate the bounce in the character almost like a very cartoony bouncy ball.

For the 3D work I did in class, I hadn’t gotten far with my normal run cycle and had already started blocking out my 2D animation, so I simply didn’t continue whatever I started doing in class with the jump cycle.

-My references were consisted of a few styles of Richard Williams jump cycles for the block out and the lecturer’s video as a helpful guide to follow and understand.

At this point I was getting a bit overwhelmed, but it felt nice to be close to the finish line. My last little tip with red dots also helped on this animation or simply looking at the ankles to see if they created arches. I would like to mention that the arms were awkward to work with as I wasn’t sure what to do with them while the character was running.

I can tell this animation shows I started to let things go from exhaustion.

Here is my block out:

My final animation:

The 3D version of this walk was the only one I felt slightly confident in but the 2D animation was going a lot faster, so I decided to keep my focus on 2D.

-My references were consisted of the Richard Run cycle, the lectures cycle.

For this cycle I felt slightly more confident specially after getting the arms right in the previous cycle. I kept my design simple as to focus on getting the principles right first.

The issues I had with this cycle were fairly small, after feedback I had to fix a silhouette issue; the left leg had to be tweaked so it would be possible to tell the legs apart and avoid flickering and making the nose of my character thinner so we could see it flop better.

here are some notes from the feedback:

Here is my cycle:

The 3D version of this cycle which could have been the sneak cycle we worked on in class, I struggled with slightly but because I believe I hadn’t saved it properly and lost the progress I did for the torso, which was discouraging, and my decision was clear by this point 2D was the fastest option.

-My references consisted of Richard Williams Walk cycle, The walk cycle our lecturer showed us with 3D form and  looking at 1930s style of animation like “Koko the Clown Performs Saint James Infirmary Blues” and was inspired by an animation done by a student from the previous years (Kori Jadczak’s confident sassy walk)

I initially started with an angry walk cycle but when I decided to ad 3D form to it, I started to struggle with perspective, and I wasn’t happy at all with doing an angry walk. I tried to do a Jessica rabbit walk and studied the way she walked in the video bellow and screenshotted what I thought to be the key poses, but something felt off with the little start I had done with this walk cycle and I decided to move on to something simpler.

• My jessica rabbit walk Breakdown with an attempt:

contact pose -> down pose -> passing pose -> up pose.

My attempt:

My angry walk attempt using The breakdown shown in class from the 100 ways to walk YouTube video by Kevin Parry:

Here are my attempts with an angry walk, with and without 3D form:

Based on our time limit and not having tried adding 3D form before I thought it would be wiser to try small and get the principles right rather than jump straight into something I found too complex with the skills I’ve acquired so far but keep things interesting and slightly challenging with a 3d form.

I had a final issue with the tempo being like the vanilla walk but after seeing both with a change of tempo, slowed down, I preferred and thought the vanilla walk should be slightly slower to achieve a more casual look, and the personality walk looked far more dynamic and expressive with its current tempo.

The feedback:

• I didn’t have many struggles while working on this animation specially with the help of adding little red dots on joints which helped me with arches and having references helped a lot.

Here is the something that helped me get the arcs right:

My final animation:

For the 3D version of this walk in this case I worked on it for the longest out of all my 3D animations but the knees here were a big issue for me so I tried to get a hold of breaking the arms and moved on to 2D and didn’t polish this animation.

My references consisted of the Richard Williams Walk cycle, the lectures cycle and the walk cycle from the Endlessreference YouTube channel mentioned in our 3D class: https://youtu.be/G8Veye-N0A4?si=WVMmoMcY4tJt_eok.

• The legs and body were something I got a hold of easily without major problems except getting the in between right.
• The arms on the other hand were something I struggled with, specifically breaking the arms:

At the very start even after following our lecturer’s tutorial I didn’t understand the direction in which the arms should be broken and had done it the other way around. Thankfully with some feedback I got a good understanding of how I should apply it to my animation and tried a few times to fix it until I got a favourable result.

• I kept in mind the idea that the arm is like a ribbon with the forearm and hand overlapping.

This is the attempt I did on the double bounce class exercise where I started seeing results that satisfied me.

Here is another attempt I was also happy with.

My final walk cycle:

The general research is what I did that applied to all or most of the animations.

My cheat sheet:

I kept a folder with screenshots of whatever I found to be essential and could potentially help me such as the cycles themselves or specifically the feet and others. as well as recreated initially the Richard Williams Walk cycle to simply help me remember the essential key poses of most cycles, contact, down pose, passing pose, up pose. I also got inspired by previous years students work, known animations from cartoons which I will share on the animations where i used these.

here are some examples:

I always have Richard Williams walk cycle open when i worked on all my animations as a starting guide:

Mapping out:

How I planned out all my animation was by starting with the first contact pose to decide the weight I wanted my character to have if any and how she or he would look and kept it simple to focus more on the principles of animation rather than aesthetic, with an extra such as a nose or hair. I followed that by looking at the key poses done by Richard Williams and any other referenced, if need be, blend them together to achieve what I wanted to get, have my poses keyed and always keep spaces between them.

All thought a mistake I have noticed by the end of this assignment was that by doing that I might end up having the same tempo for most of the animations, which is something my lecturer pointed out for the personality and vanilla walk cycle.