Alright everyone it was a busy week at the studio and we had some good Friday fun for Halloween 
It’s been a lot of read an prep between work this week. Mostly it’s been the tips on the 11 Second club, but I took the time to look over the breakdown of your animation.
Keys = the main thumbnails, pretty much what you’d have on paper to happen. Man walks over, picks up chalk, writes on board. That would be 3 actions that you would space the timing on.
Extremes = all the important contact points. Things like, the man walks over, and when he sees the chalk, bending over, and then approaching the board he writes on.
Breakdowns = the arcs of action you need between an action. Simple examples are between the extremes of say a ball bounce, the hight of the bounce is the middle break down. With the previous example you have the points of contact for say the feet on the ground, but you don’t have the important middle. It’s the highest point of the walk cycle where one foot passes the other leg while moving forward. When he sees the chalk, there is an extreme before and when he locks eyes, but the breakdown for that action is his slight reaction, the anticipation of any act.
The Breakdown stage is also key because you are working out a lot of your timing at this stage. Where and when you add your frames is key, but this is also after the the extreme which you should be satisfied with before you move on, pose and timing wise.
Lastly when doing a breakdown it should be focused. The actions of the legs, arms and head should be focused on separately to avoid confusion.
THEN it’s straight ahead animation, playing with the curves, etc. If you could’t guess now this is the traditional pose to pose and straight ahead methods. Basic stuff I’m sure, but I found that a year ago I was getting lost at a certain point when animating. I would make good poses and extremes, but I think I was trying to work fast and I would get lost near the end and not finish them.
Combining those principles I’m going to make sure I find lots of reference to study for whatever action I may need. I’ll study the spacing between timing a bit more with some basic geo tests, but I’m gonna shop around 2 idea here, and at work.
- video myself doing some sword swings and hitting a hard object. I would take many many takes, and then craft and animation based on that.
2.A man is playing with a puzzle, think jenga or stacking cards, that kinda thing. he’s at a table and behind him a dog will enter. he will bark and mess up the man’s game.
With the second one there’s a lot to decide on; how the dog enters, walk or jump? What would be simple for me to have the man play with. What is his reaction, angry, upset, coy?
I thought about it and decided that to make the scene more interesting, the dog shouldn’t bark; it should MEOW. I think then I could have a very surprised reaction by the man when he turns around to see it isn’t a little cat but a great Dane behind him! There’s ideas that I think I’ll thumbnail out and I’ll get opinions on the idea, but I like that second one for the Goal of my reel to be.
