This is the final animation. Yay its done!

I decided to let the Floursack be a solid colour. The flicker is still there but even though I went through and erased anything I could see the layer editor mustn’t have understood I wanted to get ride of it, or it could just be the gif formatting again. I did have one hiccup with the text though. The text layer with the title ‘Rebound’ got lost somewhere. I couldn’t find it on any frame or layer so I couldn’t move it out of the Floursack’s way. In the end I decided to just make it look like a thought by putting the question marks at the end, (though there was some tricky colouring-in with the rebounding ball)

But the animation is finished.

The motion lines, the dotted lines and question marks have been added to the animation. I think its coming along nicely. There seems to be a flicker which may be something on one of the middle layers. I’ll do a clean up and them colour it.

The creases have been added to the floursack.

This is just the basic outline rush. The creases, shadows, colour, squash and stretch will be added later, but for now it is looking better than I expected. I was going to have the top left (Floursack’s left) ear/hand/thing rub where the ball hit it but I decided he’ll just hold where it hurts (poor thing).

The sketches from my notebook (opacity has been turned down) have been put into the animation rush. Now the rough drawings of the key poses are replaced.

This is a scan of my notes on the Floursack (had to take the page out of my notebook because the spine caused shadows and the notes wouldn’t have been clear) However these are the poses of the Floursack in pencil complete with motion arrows. Later I wrote the frames that they were on in black pen after I did my timing rush.

This is the next rush, including some things that would improve clarity. These are the motion lines following the ball, the dotted line to show direction of sight and the three question marks to show confusion. I decided to animate the question marks appearing a bit at a time and one after the other. To make it easier when I draw, I’ve also added where the ‘ears’ and ‘feet’ are on the flour sack.

This is the rushes of the key poses and breakdown keys to get the timing right. Key poses in green and breakdowns in purple, also some edits are in purple.

This is a rush of the flour sack animation to check if I’ve got the timing right. I do. But for some reason, when its put into a gif format the 49th frame has a pause when it shouldn’t. I tried it twice with a changed frame arrangement but it was the same, so its probably just the format. However, its looking good so far.

Life Drawing 02

We started with some gestural drawings but getting the hang of it is really hard. I did better than I expected though. When we did a critique of each others work one thing that stuck with me was that everyone commented on how clean my drawings were, charcoal smudges on paper and fingers are a problem when not being used to drawing with charcoal. We learned that the length from the belly-button to the collar-bone is the same length as from the belly-button to the end of the glutius. Then came a detailed analysis of the knees, and wow they are complicated to draw. I’ve been drawing knees wrong my whole life.

The sartorious muscle was called the ‘queen of gesture’ by our tutor because it should be the first gestural drawing when drawing the leg. In the gestural drawing provided on page three this is clearly shown as well as the direction of the muscles, the ones on the thigh and calf slanting inwards and down while the ankle bone slants in the opposite direction. The gestural drawing of a kneecap should resemble an ice-cream, the tip of the ‘cone’ should be the end of the sartorious muscle. When shading sometimes knees can look like they have faces. When drawing straight on, the outer side of the knee should be straight and the inner side should be curved, NOT both sides curved. I also learned that the calf muscles are different in men and women: men have shorter calf muscles than women.

gestural drawings

structural drawings with proportions and the leg

a deeper analysis of the knees and practice foreshortening

Life Drawing 01

Drawing is really hard. Apparently drawing with a pen/pencil the same way as if you were writing is wrong. That particular grip is for detail because of the small area of movement in the wrist. To draw with a wider range of motion gestural drawing is used, where the piece of charcoal is held with all fingers and the thumb (dubbed ‘monkey grip’ by the tutor). This allows movement from the wrist, elbow and shoulder resulting in long, elegant and even lines with more control on the shading. If a detail grip was used there is the likelihood of the pencil/pen/charcoal going over the same area as the line is drawn, often dubbed ‘feather edge‘.

Since we are going to be doing flour sacks the focus was on the human torso; shoulders and hips with the bendable waist are basically the flour sack that we are going to animate. After I did the gestural drawings I drew the human torso then changed it into a flour sack, this was so I could practice trying to translate an action or pose into something not humanoid. I think I did pretty well.

It started as a wavy line and it just became hair?...

It ended up as some type of plant. The part on the left shows the shading when it wasn’t purposefully smudged and the other part is purposefully smudged, as you can clearly see its blended better.

When gestural drawing a structure, start with big shapes then go to small while keeping the lines long, light and loose. There are drawings of the human torso and the flour sack interpretations.

Tutorial 7

For assessment 2 we have to animate a flour sack doing something, and the simpler the story not only is it easier to animate but it will be funnier too. Examples of simple story techniques with humor include: ‘pride comes before a fall’, when it is thought that something will turn out one way then does the opposite. ‘the chase’, nearly every silent era comedy had a chase at some point (in fact a comedian called himself Charlie Chase because he was being chased in every episode). ‘accidents happen because...’ a situation caused by a misunderstanding or another reason.

Brainstorming story ideas for the flour sack-

-Throwing a rubber ball and having it rebound into ‘face’

-Sees a mouse and in a panic runs away

-Ballet pirouette but slips and falls

-Puts on head phones and starts to bob ‘head’ in time with the music, right up until the headphones slip off

-Carrying a large and unbalanced pile of books

-Trying to wield a heavy sword

-Computer doesn’t work (enough said)

-Playing piano (hands?)

-Being chased/annoyed by a bug/mozzie

I personally will still do the rubber ball rebounding idea, but all of these other ideas are good too.

Bruno Bozzetto

HThe father of Italian homegrown animation himself, Bruno was born on March 3, 1938 an is still alive today. He was seventeen and studying law and geology when he started to animate, having no experience in it at all. At age 20, his first film, Tapum, was seen at a film festival in France and impressed a well known film producer. John Halas, who; ran ‘Halas and Batchelor’ with his wife, had made the first feature length animated film in Britain- ‘Animal Farm’ 1954, and wrote the book ‘Timing for Animation’,   was so impressed with Bruno’s work that he offered him a one year internship in London, which Bruno accepted. During this time he worked on many short films and commercials, and after the internship and moving back to Italy he became a newspaper cartoonist.

Since he worked mostly by himself the traditional style of drawing every frame became tiring very quickly, so he was one of the first people to use Adobe Flash. By using this at the time ‘new’ technology, he had created a new style of animating that many animators including myself use to this day, known as ‘Tradigital’ (Combining traditional drawing technique and digital technology).

His ability to produce was incredible even with very limited resources. His ideas are great and always within the technical boundaries of his animation and his animation always has story continuity; beginning, middle, end. His style of humor always plays a big part in this too because he understood that a story has more impact if its funny. His European humor differs from American humor (which is usually more physical) and comes from an Italian tradition called commedia dell’arte, and this humor is never out of context which adds to its impact. The way he integrates storytelling, humor and graphic design is amazing, and his characterization of personalities is key in this. He is also really good with music as it underlies the character’s behavior, just as he uses complementary sound effects which never overstate itself.

Many of his animations are easily accessible and I’ve found many that are incredibly humorous. Truly, he is a great animator (and he’s got the awards to prove it if you don’t believe me).

Pictures are taken from:

http://www.snipview.com/q/Bruno_Bozzetto?alt=Bruno_bozzetto

http://fr.film-cine.com/west-and-soda-m38598

https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/italy

(wow, that’s a lot of different type of coffee)

This is the timing chart for the bounces of the animation till the point that it splits, complete with the Bouncing Ball at the end of the action. (sorry if the timing lines are a little too light to make out clearly)

I’ve just noticed that exporting these animations into GIFs and uploading them seem to have caused some of the animation’s quality to change, like grainy colours on the shadows and water. This seems to be different on different computers and/or programs, it looks okay from the editing blog side but when I logged out to get the tumblr link it looked weird. Maybe this is what happens with a GIF format. I’m sorry if this is the case for you, but I’m not sure how to fix this.

This is the final animation for Glass Bouncing Ball with Water. 

(and the moral of this animation is that just because a glass ball CAN bounce, doesn't necessarily mean it SHOULD)

Tutorial 6

I finally finished the Bouncing Ball made of Glass with Water. (I’ll need to come up with a better name than that) There were a few final edits to do for the timing. The Ball was supposed to go faster at the beginning and slower as it progressed, but the first bounce looked like it was the same speed as the later ones. It was recommended that I take out some of the empty frames/doubles to speed it up and that seems to have worked. I am quite happy with the result. 

We also started to talk about the next animation, a flour sack. A helpful tip for animators is that the flour sack is basically animated the same way as the human torso without limbs or head. We can choose what the flour sack will do and there is no limit to the length (but the shorter it is the less we have to animate). The flour sack must demonstrate ALL the principles of animation and must include - ANTICIPATION to an action - the ACTION - and the REACTION to the action. 

The idea I have decided to do for my animation is throwing a rubber ball. ANTICIPATION: flour sack tosses the ball in the air and catches it again.   ACTION: flour sack throws the ball to the side, the rubber ball rebounds off the side of the screen/wall and comes right back, the rubber ball hits the four sack in the ‘face’ knocking them over.                                                                REACTION: flour sack sits up and while rubbing the side of their face; flour sack looks down at the ball, then at the screen/wall it rebounded off, then back at the ball.

The anticipation and the reaction make the action funnier than if it was alone.