Week 3

The week of the lift woooo!!!

Before i started producing my animation me and jenny recorded our actions so that we could get the timing better, which was very amusing as we had to make the sound effects of lifting a box to be able to act it out right.



I do have a slight problem with using the way i lift a box as a reference as i don't feel i lift a heavy box properly in the first place =S.

I was still undecided on whether i wanted to do 2d or 3d but when i started making the lift in 2d my decision was very easy because it was terrible!! I wanted to draw it on the computer instead of on paper however i haven't really got the hang of drawing on flash because its not the same as drawing with a pencil. So i tried drawing the frames on corel painter with my pen tablet. I wanted to get a rough idea whether this would work in the first place so i decided to just draw the first part of my animation where he rubs his hands together. This is how it turned out.



As you can see the size of the box shrinks as you watch the animation also the person changes size. I think this is because i was worried about the time i had to produce it and i rushed so it looked really bad, and also because i found drawing on the computer harder than it was on paper. So i decided to make my lift animation in 3d as i thought i would produce a better quality animation.

This is the 3d animation that i produced



I enjoyed making this animation in 3d more than the walk cycle as i could put more character into the animation. However i did find some problems with animating the character itself near the end of the animation. When i moved part of his spine other parts of his body would move that i didn't want it to even though i keyed those parts beforehand. So i ended up just moving the hips neck and shoulders. Because of this i couldn't get as good of a bend in my character when he picked up the crate. I felt that the preparation and anticipation of the lift was good and felt that it gave him character. But when it got to the actual lift itself it went wrong, as if someone actually lifted an object like that they would fall straight forward because his center of gravity is wrong. I did try improving this as in my animation i moved his feet forward and back to improve his center of gravity but didn't move them enough.

The feedback i got from kathy this week was that she wanted to see more drawings that show how people lean and how that effects their body language. These are the images that i produced this week. I took the idea that kathy gave about drawing from films which i quite enjoyed though found it hard to find scenes in films where there are two people interacting with each other instead of over the shoulder shots! which are mainly used. I mainly drew with using pen and pencil this week which i thought looked quite effective. I tried more simple drawings without facial expressions to see if i could get the persons character across without.