Weeks 9, 10 and 11 – Quadruped Cycles, Body Acting and the V&A
I’ve let this blog slip behind a bit, so I’m going to summarise how the last 3 weeks of term went down and what work I’ve got to carry on with over the Christmas holidays.
Weeks 9 and 10 saw us looking at 4-legged run cycles, or quadruped cycles. I was a little concerned at how I’d do simply because human walk cycles gave me enough trouble already. I think the most interesting part of this for me was learning how the back legs of horses moved – I’d always assumed that both sets of knees faced the same direction, so when keyframing a horse cycle, I had trouble not instinctively making the knees in the same direction.
I got three different attempts at a quadruped cycle – the first horse cycle (which I would submit for my assessment), a 3D dog run cycle (which we lined up against Muy’s photographs), and a final dog run cycle in 2D. The horse cycle turned out best, and I got to grips with what leg should be on the ground at what time. I can’t say the same for the dog cycles – the 3D cycle felt stiff and kept jolting, whilst the 2D dog cycle has some errors with the legs where I’ve accidentally in-betweened them in the same spot. I had the same issue with the horse cycle when I submitted for the assessment later on, but have since fixed it.
Week 10 also saw us learn to use Adobe Animate for the first time. It took time getting used to, I wasn’t able to hold frames or fill colour for a while. Using objects in our general vicinity, we created characters to animate, creating mac-bottle-scissor boy as seen above. I managed to get a bounce before bumping into issues with colouring and the bucket tool. Animate seems like a good program to use, and I’d like to go back to it some time later on.
The final week of term saw us learning about body acting, about bringing characters to life when they encounter an object or an event. Steve showed classic cartoons like Disney’s 3 little pigs adaptations and old Looney Tunes films, as well as breaking down types of animation such as pose-to-pose and radio animation, the latter being a limited form of animation that serves the story enough to convey it.
Doing this exercise made me realise how much I lean into radio animation – almost all of my exercises and pre-MA work leans into this approach. How many frames can I get away with? How much can I limit the animation without compromising the story? To go from that to a higher frame count felt oddly bizarre, but hopefully I’ll start to adapt to this newer mindset to make more expressive animation.
I want to talk about victorian designs for a moment. Closer to the end of term, I started looking at fashion attires of the victorian era to the 1900s, primarily because I find it somewhat similar to my own dress sense (albeit with colours I don’t typically wear). I took a trip to the V&A with some friends where I got to see some of these up close. I observed the types of jackets, skirts, jackets, shirts and neckwear and came up with the designs seen above based on some of these outfits I saw below, before implementing them into the body acting exercise. I’m sure the designs themselves could be made more interesting and more colourful, maybe thinking more about how to represent texture such as velvet, or patterns that invoke that era. But as first designs go, they’re not bad by any means.
During this time, I’d also made an update to my mood-change walk, inspired by Mary-Clare’s last life-drawing session. I wasn’t particularly happy with the first version, mainly because there wasn’t much in the way of the character taking an event or an obstacle in. This new version breaks down a reaction into stages, first acknowledging this floating character, then trying to get her attention before walking off with a double take (the latter idea suggested by Shaun during our formative assessment). Overall, I’m much happier with this new version, as it takes narrative a bit more seriously and allows for some playful reactions.
Wrapping up this term was another physical theatre workshop. We had to pick an animal, and we spent much of the day learning how we could interpret our chosen animals, their body language, habits, before spending half an hour acting as them and alternating between a human-equivalent and a full interpretation of them.
And that concludes my opening term at MA Character Animation. I’ve learnt a great deal, such as timing and spacing, how to avoid robotic or repetitive timing by thinking about where the character should be during keyframing (although timing charts are still beyond me at this point). I’ve learnt about more dynamic posing, how to draw and build characters from shapes and turnarounds for character designs. I’ve gotten a taste of various software: Maya, Adobe Animate, TV Paint etc., and I’ve become much more aware of my own character art in animation. I’m very much looking forward to moving on from technical exercises next term, and see which 2nd year I get paired up with to help out.