Week 2

Last week our assignment was to create two one second animations. The first animation was supposed to be made up of 24 drawn out frames, thus creating a frame by frame animation. Our second animation was supposed to use the same 24 frames minus every other frame, resulting in an animation that lacked some detail and resulted in a bit more choppiness.

Rather than animating a line across the stage as we practiced in class with the help of the onion skin tool, I decided to use the brush tool to create a simple animation of a tree. For many of my frames, I copied and pasted previous frames and then made slight adjustments. I played around with different color brushes and I tried to create a little story. I wish that I had stuck with animating a line across the stage rather than trying to fit so much information in a one second animation. I was pleased with my result, however after the critique I found that animating a line and getting it exactly right would have probably been more useful as practice for future assignments.

On Thursday we spent a few minutes looking at everyone's one second animations, and then we learned about walk cycles. We spent most of class working on a simple walk cycle animation. I found this to be very challenging because it involved a lot of drawing! We were encouraged to pretty much just draw stick figures, but attempt to capture accurate movement of the arms and legs. In addition, we looked at the work of one artist whose work I very much admired. She has a very distinctive style and although the characters she creates are simple, the manner in which they move is so accurate that I found them quite mesmerizing. I decided that the best thing that I could do was to use a reference to aid me in drawing out a walk cycle. I found images on one website that were very helpful and I looked at the work of the artist that we looked at in class as inspiration.