Over the course of the term, I
have looked at the 12 main principles of animation and how they apply to
different mediums such as 2D, 3D and Stop Motion. Additionally, I have partaken
in Life Drawing lessons, so to develop my skills at posture and movements for
character animation as well as to enhance our observational skills, skills
extremely important to an animator.
One of the simplest
animation tests I was shown was that of a bouncing ball, this was something
that we tried in all 3 mediums as well as being shown examples of in lectures.
I found this exercise to be quite useful as it not only allowed me to play
around with squash and stretch, which is my favourite principle to work with,
but also allowed me to come to grips with spacing and timing. This was a fairly
straight forward task in Toon Boom Harmony as I found the interface easy to
use. In Maya however, the task was took a step further as I was asked to make
the ball bounce across the screen, rather than on the spot, until it came to a
stop. The part I found challenging here was that each time the ball bounced, as
it would not bounce as high, it would not squash and stretch as much and so I
had to calculate different amounts of squashing and stretching for each bounce.
When it came to stop motion, rather than a ball we were bouncing, I was asked
to use a cube, and so squash and stretch didn’t really factor into the task,
but rather it was about the timing and spacing as I did the exercise as though
it was a light tennis ball bouncing, or a heavy cannon ball, allowing me to
experiment with the concept of weight. 
I was able to show
anticipation and overlapping action in my 2D work with my jumping box, and in
3D with my baseball bat swing. For my box jump, I was tasked with making a box
character jump, the character was only allowed to have a head and arms, and
could not have any details on him, so as to both keep him simple, and so that I
wouldn’t animate anything that would distract from the jump. Even though my box
didn’t have any legs, I was still able to bend the box as if it were bending
its knees in anticipation of the jump it’s about to do, as well as have it
squash both at the top of the arc in the jump, and in the overlapping action of
when the box lands. Additionally, I decided to put in some secondary animation
by giving the box a hat which would linger in the air for a bit after the
character has jumped before going back on the box’s head. As character
animation can become quite complicated when it comes to 3D, when it came to
animating a swinging bat with anticipation, the exclusion of a person holding
the bat at first felt challenging, however I was able to realise that the
actual movement of the bat itself could get across all the information needed.
I had to think how I would swing a bat, and the answer was that you would
almost pull the bat back twice before swinging it, as if you were trying to do
a practice swing first. During Stop Motion I tried to place anticipation and
overlapping action into my animation of an armature throwing a ball and think I
managed to do this successfully. The main problem in animating the armature is
that I found him very difficult to work with as he kept moving when I was
trying to capture a frame, and was quite stiff and difficult to manipulate into
the right positions making me very frustrated. As such, when it came to
animating the swinging of the bat, I decided to just animate the swing rather
than the anticipation, as I did not really want to have to move the puppet’s
feet too much, I did however animate the follow through of the swing after the
puppet had hit the mimed ball. 
I have probably
explored the principle of arcs the most through the life drawing sessions I
have taken part in. The models have been able to get themselves into some weird
and wonderful positions where you’d think they are pushing the spine to the
limit, however the best example of arcs I have used this term comes from the
National Ballet workshop, as rather than being still models posing, I was given
the chance to draw ballet dancers during their warm up, and some of the
drawings I made were really able to capture a dynamic sense of movement through
the quick curves I sketched on the page, as they were actually moving quite fast.
Life Drawing has also helped me fine tune my observational skills and I feel
like I am able to get the posture and balance of the figure much more
accurately in my drawings because of it. This was something I found helpful
when animating the armature in stop motion. As the armature was difficult to
manoeuvre, I was able to spot when I was placing him into a position where I
would break the spine or a joint, when this was not the desired result at the
time, and so would have to wrestle with the puppet to get it into a desired
position that would also have correct posture and balance. 
I was able to show
both exaggeration and weight in my 2D animation of two boxes jumping, as well
as in my stop motion of an armature picking up a box. In my Boxo Jr. scene, inspired by Pixar’s
Luxo Jr., I had a small box jump out of and trying to impress a big box, only
for the big box to do a humungous jump out of frame and to land leaving the
small box ashamed. The exaggeration came mainly when I was animating the big box
jump as I stretched the character quite far as he takes off, as well as
squashed him on the landing to exaggerate the character’s size and weight. I
managed to show the weight of the two characters through the spacing of the
images, I learnt that lighter characters have more frames in the air as they’re
landing, where as a heavier object has less frames, and just squashes into the
lowest pose more quickly. My animation of the armature picking up a box
showcased these principles as I exaggerated the weight of the box the armature
is picking up by having the armature struggle at first to pick it up as well as
have it buckling whilst holding the box, and then eventually, dropping the
block as it is too heavy.
When animating my boxes in 2D, I
have made a conscious decision to break the joints to convey a fluid sense of
movement, particularly around the wrists, or at least, where the wrists should
be. This works quite well as they are quite cartoony characters and breaking
physics is to be expected, however, I also applied this in my walk cycle I
created using a video of myself for a reference video. The walk of course moves
like I do, however I have exaggerated it slightly so that the wrist lags
slightly on the arm movement. Even though this flexibility is more subtle, it
still breaks the wrists to allow for fluidity. The cartoony nature of the boxes
allows them to be somewhat appealing, and the simplicity and lack of detail on
the boxes that I mentioned earlier are a part of this charm. Even with the lack
of features, the boxes are able to feel somewhat relatable, whether it’s the
hat the jumping box is wearing, the father-son relationship in the Boxo Jr.
scene, or the phone texting in my double take scene.
When it came to the staging of
the scenes, I found myself sometimes over animating. The main problem I found
was with the Boxo Jr. scene, as I had two characters to work with rather than
one, and so when I placed the larger character into the centre of the screen, I
found the smaller character being squashed out of frame. Additionally, I was
animating both characters at once when I really needed to animate them almost
one at a time, or only use subtler movements when the other character is
moving. I also found myself over animating in 3D as I constantly wanted to add
in some camera movements to make the shot look dynamic, however I have learnt
to not use this tactic too much unless I want my films too look nauseating.
For my final
assessment, I was asked to compile a show reel featuring all of my work from the
last term in the Animation Principles unit. I selected the track ‘Little Idea’
from Bensound.com and created both a title card and credits card in Adobe After
Effects, I then brought these and all of my work into Adobe Premiere to edit
them together. The show reel was created at the standard 16:9 aspect ratio at
1080p, but as not all of my work was created at this size, I had to either crop
out sections of the video where nothing was happening anyway, or I had to
duplicate the video, enlarge it and then blur it, to avoid the black bars that
would have been left there otherwise. For my life Drawings, as I did not want
just static images in my otherwise animated show reel, I placed all of the
images that I wanted to use onto a large Adobe Photoshop file and have the
camera pan across the drawings, so that the still figures would still have some
movement to them.
Overall, I have learnt a lot in
my first term at university when it comes to applying the main principles of
animation to my work, and I have seen a big improvement in my work when I
compare it to what I made last year on my foundation, or even when I compare
what I made at the start of the term to now.
