Animations from Portsmouth by Rosie : April 2014

Term 1

I feel like the drag of the balls tail exercise and the weighted bouncing balls didn't so much cover new ground, but reinforced things that I already knew. But by actually doing the exercises and ultimately getting them wrong, I think that was where I really learnt the principles. The feedback, and understanding what I had previously missed, is what truly reinforced my own understanding of them.
Probably the main thing I feel I've learnt was on timing, easing into something and then out, creating a more interesting and smooth animation over all. It became easier to plot out the ideas I had in my head. I think before coming to university I had a rather big misunderstanding of how timing worked, more fps for slow movements and less for fast. And whilst this made do in my previous work, the ladders and plotting keyframes was a very beneficial insight.
That said even when given the key frames, the walk cycle was definitely the most challenging. Looking back on it, now that I've done it, over all it didn't seem too hard, but at the time that was something I struggled to get my head around. I'm not entirely happy with the overall quality of that animation, but at the same time it’s not something I want to revisit. I would like to re do this but in a different way to keep it interesting.
The drawing classes with Jackie and Meg were probably the most beneficial in getting better at drawing. I also rather enjoyed it as I felt the progress I was making was visible in my work, it sparked an interest in drawing quick figures in my personal studies, and I also found the life drawing classes provided in the evening were beneficial as well. I wouldn't say I'm a good life drawer but I think I can capture form much better than before coming to university and I really wish I'd known all the different drawing techniques earlier. Those really helped me.
Using the light boxes and paper and pencil as opposed to flash was probably one of the better learning curves, again as the only real animation I'd created before university was on Flash. I’d used a lot tweening in my work on flash as I found it quicker and thought (at the time) that it looked okay (sorry >.>’’) and now working on the light boxes, I felt like I was actually animating… All be it, not very well. But I was getting stuff done, relatively quickly and it looked… Better.
I do remember being very cagey about my work at the start of the term, unsure of how good everyone else was and deeming my own work to not be very good. I wouldn't say my appraisal of my own work had risen over the weeks but I do feel more comfortable showing my work now than I did. That said I should probably show what I've done more.
Towards my work I was pretty passionate, excited to move onto the next principle and I was enjoying the lessons, ultimately I probably became very lax in the last few weeks.
I feel like I’ve progressed and that does make me happy but I feel like the knowledge I know is definitely something I’ll need to work on more and I expect I’ll be returning very consciously to what we did in this term in my next works.

Term 2

The blob characters, my obsession with koalas defiantly made this one of the most fun exercises so far. Designing the character, that was something I really enjoyed. Getting the character consistent on the other hand… That was annoying. I kept getting to a stage where I was okay at consistently drawing the blobs and then I’d leave and when I came back to it, it was very inconsistent. Consistency was definitely one of my weaker points in these exercises. And I think one of the main problems was I didn’t show my work enough so I wasn’t being corrected and kept doing the wrong thing.
I also didn’t time these projects very well, at all. I found at the end when I had to get everything done for the hand in that I’d pretty much done half of all the works but I hadn’t actually finished anything. Whilst this gave me the opportunity to go back and change some of the ideas I’d had like for the farting koala and the intro, ultimately it was a bit of a wakeup call that I needed to get them all done. Next term I’m aiming to get it done asap I’ve heard from the second years how much work they have and I feel my time management skills can be put to better use.
Backing up things was also something I found in this, I had a brief scare where I thought I’d lost all my work. And when it came to adding my older works to the show reel I only had really bad copies and my original frames had been ruined. So back up things 3 times and make sure the dragon frame final shots are good quality (Wait for the lamps to warm up).
Another cool thing I found was you can access the dragon frame files and then put them into flash which I wish I’d found earlier. Because one of the main reasons I preferred flash was because you didn’t have to scan all your images in so it skipped a step and because you can hide different layers. I quite like the pencil style being added into flash.
I feel I’ve progressed in how, last term I thought I understood the principles and then when it came to making these blobs, consistency, how key frames need to have that consistency, charting the movement across the page to help maintain that consistency,(you can see a theme here…) they are all things I pretty much forgot and I went completely wrong and had to re do so much. I think I was rushing as well so ultimately that didn’t work out, and I hadn’t shown my work to Tony or Meg either so… That’s probably the main things that I learnt this term; Time management, consistency and showing my work.