End Of The Year Blogpost

5/17

Ballerina Animation

While watching videos to learn move about how a ballerina moves I came across this one. It helps put the movement into a more 2D space which it what I am doing in my animation. I also wanted to learn specific moves ballerinas use so I could incorporate in into my animation. Though investigation took longer than expected and the planning was a bit more tedious because I wanted to put together a whole routine. After that I got to work on my animation.

I am obviously not quite finished. I have many more movements and I wanted to play more with the 2D space and even try moving a camera angle or two. So far I think it is decent, but a little choppy. I struggled with finding how to pose the character after the previous movement. Another thing I would want to fix is consistency. The bun moves all over the place, my problem was onion skinning wasn't working part of the time so the bun and the shoes are a bit odd each frame. But, I do plan on working on it further.

4/26

There is something so graceful and interesting with how ballerinas move. As I wanted try get into 2D animation and I wanted to try animating humans, why not try something interesting like a form of dance. I chose classical ballet and I had to get an idea of how ballerinas move so I watched many videos online like this one. Then I went into my program and had to map out what I wanted the ballerina's movement to look like and the design of the character.

I wanted it to be simple, but then when just using black and white it got boring, so I decided to add shadows. The shadows add more a more dynamic and 3D look to the overall animation and the character. I went through many phases to come to the conclusion to made it simple. At first I drew a whole stage and had planned to use color and facial expressions, but the project became muddy and looked very poorly done. The black and white it much better, because you can focus more on the movement.

5/10 investigation

Investigation

5/3 investigation

Animating Cycles

Walking and running are much different when it come to animating. I think there are three parts to a character rig, the legs, the arms, and the body. Each part has a different motion to follow, yet they effect each other. The legs and body sort of move together and the arms move opposite the legs. To get a smooth animation the parts of the body need to move at the right timing and that is what I am struggling with. I can’t seem to get a smooth animation, it always ends up choppy.

I am not only doing walking and maybe some running in my animation, I am also doing climbing which I feel would be difficult. It is a lot different than a walk or run but also similar. The leg movements are still opposite one another and so are the arms, it’s just different because the model is sideways and making the body look like it is actually grabbing on to something is a challenge.