I like cut out stop motion:

I have been working on my project for a while, and I like the way it is starting to come together, but I wish I could film it again. I am not totally happy with the amount of frames I have to work with. If I could do it over I would have stuck more to my story board and made my characters head fall off. I think that would have looked really cool in stop motion. I also would have made a more solid puppet. When I was moving him around, the fasteners were getting stuck on the other pieces and ripping the paper a little bit.

I am taking a break now, and I looked up some cut out stop motion animations. here are some I liked:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m75xgnpOu2I&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58nLHhE277Y&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSPIDbcaQus&feature=related

Stop Motion:

This week’s project is a stop motion puppet. I have always liked stopped motion, I remember being young and seeing the Nightmare Before Christmas. It had a big impact on me. It looked like something that I had never seen before. Even if you know nothing about animation there is still something “real” about the way those characters move. They are not always the smoothest but they are always some how very organic. The characters in this film really come to life, it amazing what the animators can do with simple characters. My favorite parts of this film are the sets/props, and the amazing camera work.

This sequence has some impressive camera work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaxKiZfQcX8

 I am looking forward to animating my paper puppet; I just hope he stays together.

Character Moving Weight In Perspective:

For our new weight project we have to have our character lifting or pushing the weight with some sort of perspective. I am not really sure how to do this. I understand how two point perspective works, but its little weird doing it on a character. On this site:

http://www.drawmarvel.com/chapters/foreshortening.html

They have a little run down on how to use the perspective line to make the character have the right perspective. I understand a little better now, but I am still not totally sure what I am doing. I still don’t really understand what the perspective grid is going to do for this animation… I guess it will determine how large the character is and what angle they stand at. That will be helpful. If I can figure it out it will give this animation a 3d feel.

Weight:

Our next project will be on how to animate pushing/ lifting something heavy. I went and searched for some tips and I couldn’t find anything worth while so I decided to go and fine some good animation of characters lifting and pushing some thing heavy. I came across some of these animations:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LVN3Vpvqog&feature=related

I like the poses in this one; the character gets low and tries to lock out his arms but seems to be having a hard time. There is a great sense of weight in this animation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAX1psrxe-4&feature=related

This is another push animation and it is nice how the character changes his pushing grip around when the first one isn’t working. It makes the character seem like he was thinking.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzAQmDIZRJY

This video has a lot of anticipation and it seems like goofy is thinking and trying to figure out what grip will work best. It looking like a pencil test but you still get the idea that the ball is heavy

For this project I think that the key poses are going to be very important I may have to animate the key frames, and then add the in-betweens instead of just animated straight ahead, like I normally do.

Perspective:

Perspective isn’t my favorite thing to do. I think I have a hard time with perspective, because it involves being exact. Having to map everything out, and measuring everything frame takes away form the “flow” I normally have while animating. It may not like working in perspective, but I understand how important it is to creating realistic animation. I hope with more practice it will become second nature and I will be able to eyeball it. For this weeks project I looked up some websites to help. I came across these two sites:

http://www.wonderhowto.com/how-to-understand-perspective-for-animation-154267/

http://www.animatedbuzz.com/tutorials/perspective01.html

These sites have some good tips, and on the “wonderhowto” website there is a cool perspective animation at the end. It was interesting to see perspective on a simple character. When you plan everything out it seems like perspective isn’t that bad.