Through this module I have learned the basics of animating characters in 2D and 3D software. Now I shall reflect on my efforts in both mediums, where I think my strengths lie and where I could improve.

 

We dived into 2D animation with ToonBoom software to practise animating the human body. That was where my skills started off being rough around the edges. Stills of me walking had all been uploaded onto my Wix account in the wrong order. That caused my animation to look jerky, inconsistent and too fast. What’s more, the anatomy looked quite uneven because I drew each frame in the outline of myself. The animation lacked continuity and had no sense of cycle to it. Needless to say, by exposing these faults, I think we saw where I needed to develop my skills in 2D animation.

I gave it a second shot with a much more different approach. This second one had extra attention paid to the human body, more continuity between the contact, down, pass and up positions and consistent transition in movement. With extra attention paid to Richard Williams’ ‘Animators Survival Guide’ and some thought back to my drawing techniques, I remembered how fantasy artist Bryan Baugh mapped out anatomy. I earned credit for my retry, though it was the arms and feet that needed work, as they did not move in a cycle. But this first try was rewarding and instructive for my techniques.

 

When it came to animating a person lifting a heavy object, I still succeeded in anatomy and the walk cycle, but I had not included the bin I had been carrying. Also I had animated the person leaning the whole way back without even shifting posture. What I had not noticed is that in my stills, I am leaning forward, not back. I must have dived straight in without properly looking at the recording. One part I particularly found difficult was keeping the lining on Toonboom consistent. Parts of my character like the midsection or head seemed to distend during playback. I have tried to counter this with the eraser tool but it gets time consuming.

 

Character design was quite insightful as to the purpose of animating. I chose George, the protagonist from the Disney short ‘Paperman,’ because I saw in him those comically gangly figures like John Cleese’s Basil Fawlty. Though I think that made decent visual reference, I think I should have saved some screenshots, printed and stuck them into my sketchbook. Recording John Cleese’s movements from a screen made it hard to come up with a consistent layout compared to if I stuck them down in a series of shots on the page. But to my mind, choosing live action footage to prompt a 2D animation corresponds with how Disney, Rob Zemeckis and Richard Williams used visual reference for their work on ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit.’ Granted these animators rotoscoped the central characters like Jessica Rabbit. But using reality for artistic inspiration provides animation with story and nuance.

 

I did struggle a bit with lip-syncing. I had caught on to the fact that this animation had to be a character, not just a mouth, so the actor who says ‘Let’s boogie’ from ‘This is Spinal Tap’ was looked at and served as a good prompt on how I visualised a hip and cool man saying this line. It fascinated me how my drawing style could animate a character enhanced by speech, but drawing one frame after another on ToonBoom bogged me down, not to mention the lining rippled from frame to frame. It was like the character’s shape was morphing. Duplicating the character and concentrating on the mouth saved me a lot of time. The audio file in the timeline really helped to gradually build up the speech movement through sections in the frames, because Richard Williams cites hopping from one expression straight to the other is too crude. However, I had not counted on the fact that I had to animate the character’s jaw as well. As Richard Williams would put it, a lot of the action happens below the cheek bones. What I could have tried was squashing and stretching the face to get a better sense of facial animation. But lip-syncing definitely increased my confidence in 2D animation.

 

Of all the hurdles this module presented me, Maya has been the biggest. The technology was so hard to understand, I almost always needed help getting a model to move and animate into the timeline. Rigged models downloaded from Sketchfab either opened only as folders with textures and a rar. file or I had no way to animate them once opened on Maya. The solution has been to use the more malleably ‘bony’ model for movement and ‘blake’ model for lip-syncing.

When bony walks, he goes at a leisurely, unhurried pace which I think is close enough to how I did when filming footage for my 2D walk cycle. Lifting and flexing the foot convincingly on Maya was difficult. Maya was so complex and different to Toon Boom, it took time for me to catch on. A lot of the time I had to be guided and talked through the software. It did weigh me down and there were concerns about falling behind the others.  

Challenging as Maya was, I could not ignore the fact that lip-syncing worked both similarly and differently to what I did in 2D animation. The technology let me squash and stretch facial expressions, but keys had to be inserted before the character’s mouth could be manipulated. Unlike in 2D, where every frame has to be drawn into a gradual process, once I squashed or stretched the face, Maya did all the sections for me. Trying to memorise in what order to I had to insert keys and time the phonemes could be quite fiddly, possibly because this was more or less a computerised animation formula.

In another book I looked into, I came to grasp that a second of animation is worth 24 frames. In Maya, keyframes in the timeline were inserted using the 3 and/or 6x tables for consistent timing, as Myron ‘Grim’ Natwick established to Richard Williams.

 

Easter would be spent in Cornwall so this called for animating on the move. Luckily I chose to download the ‘Animation Creator’ app and Jacqui was kind enough to provide me with a stylus, or I would spend the next couple of weeks drawing animation frames with my finger.

Independent study during Easter meant having to do without help from Jacqui for two weeks. While I had ambition to animate fight scenes, dance moves and walks, the amount of frames and timing made it long and slow. Still, it was my chance to evoke my love for fantasy through 2D animation, so it provided me with some artistic freedom. Channelling my inner Bruce Timm, who created the DC Animated Universe, I applied my characterisation through my own crisp drawing style. Drawing 24 frames was tough and I wondered if I was exerting myself too much. Like lip-syncing, copying and pasting frames was economical and made things slightly easier. Animating two knights and female figures was helped by stills stuck into my sketchbook. Swordfights became slow and I was not quite in the frame of mind to finalise them. Animation Creator became a favourite medium as I animated characters I could come up with. It fascinated me how I could interpret stills into frames and flesh out the movement through ‘inbetweening.’ The knight has an austere, arrogant stride and he almost stomps with a heavy gait. My fantasy female warrior confidently struts forwards with her cape and hood giving her a mysterious appearance. The Cavalry officer looks menacing as she aims and lets off her pistol. I think that funny dialogue like “I blame you” and “Oh shut up” from Dreamworks’ animated film ‘The Road to El Dorado’ were a good source to recite and work from because I got to animate some drama between two characters through facial expressions and gesture. I found that lessening the amount of frames can create sudden and rapid movement, because too many frames delayed action like in a couple of my swordfight animations. But on the other hand, my hand-drawn animation has a bad habit of rippling during playback. I imagine I have yet to get a steady enough hand to execute seamless 2D animation. Phonemes on Maya have been tricky and the mouth movements do not feel 100% accurate. What’s more, Maya sometimes crashed, which did hamstring my efforts. But animating a shotput throw did enlighten me how a 3D animated model could interact with a virtual environment.

Despite the difficulties I encountered, I am glad to have tried my hand at 2D and 3D animation. There was more I think I could have uploaded. When it comes to my best work, I tend to focus more on quality than quantity, so I only hope what I submitted was sufficient.

 

 

 

Williams, R. 2001. Animator’s Survival Guide

 

Whitaker, H. Halas, J. 1981. Timing For animation

 

Roberts, S. 2004. Character animation in 3D

 

Baugh, B. 2007, Swords and Sorcery: How to draw Fantastic Fantasy adventure comics

 

http://fuckyeahbrucetimm.tumblr.com/ 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOTnQZFjOsg