More Talks, and More Caffiene

Today we had our second animation principles seminar tteaching us about the laws of animation. Last time we learnt about stretch and squash and a little about timing. Today we did more on timing and as a result i remade a bouncing ball animation on flash. although it is only a small quick animation, the bouncy ball seems to be really good for testing animation principles on. So here is the new improved ball, with better timing, so it slows at the top of its arc and speed up on the way down.

We also spoke about anticipation and overstep. Anticipation is the movement before an action, like the bending of the knees before you jump, and overstep is what you do after the action. We also talked a little bit about putting emotion into movement which was interesting. We we then given the BoxMan assignment where we have a week to make an animation of a simple box with a ball for a head and stick arms, which we have to animate jumping, using stretch, suash, anticipation, overstep and timing. Then after it has made the jump it needs to show an emotion. I look forward to making it on paper but I cam home to create some trial runs in flash first so i can work out the anticipation and overstep.

We also had a day yesterday full of lectures which included our second history and theory lecture. We had two reading to do for this one, one 33 pages long and one 28 pages long. The first was all about violence and how it effects people, and how you can change the order or sequencing of a scene to change how it is viewed.  So you could put the victim first, or the person commiting the crime or the place where the crime is committed and all of these cause people to look at the scene differently. The other readin was all about mis-en-scene. I find them difficult to read because its written in a rather dull format, and i find it hard to get stuck in to them, especially with the second one.

We then moved on to a lecture by Derek on Storyboaring which was awesome and I though it was really fun. He really seems to know what he is on about and is obviously enthusiastic which is cool. He showed us the storyboards for a film by Aardman called The Tortoise and The Hare. It was meant to follow Chicken run, but it first had some scripting issues, and once they were resolved dreamworks and Aardmans partnership fell through and it never came out. this is a shame because it looked like a good movie and the scene that we saw storyboarded was good. It was 100 storyboards for one scene, but everyone was vital and told part of the story. Afterwards Derek and Kathy lead us in a storyboarding workshop where we were given a scenario and then had to make a storyboard for that scenario. It was good, but before I scan mine up onto this blog, I want to refine it more, as my drawin was prett shabby, and though I know that storyboards arent meant to be about drawing, I saw the quality of everyone elses and I know I can do that well if I try harder, so that is todays task :]

Also in one of those seminars ( I think it was Dereks one as he was talking about how animations doesn't have to cut to change scenes like live action does) we were shown th following animation which I though was immense, and reminded me a little bit of the Monty python animations. Enjoy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmR0V6s3NKk