Animation Ramble - Appealing ARCs = Happy Animator

No matter how ambitious or good you get at animation you always have to keep one eye on the fundamentals.....

7 comments:

Carlos Fins said...

This is an awesome post. It's awesome when someone goes through the trouble of analyzing video ref. Thanks for not only putting this together, but making the ref available and also showing your technique of frame-by-framing it in Flash.. I'm definitely trying that. Thanks!

-Carlos

Ian said...

Hey Carlos

Glad you liked the post and made a comment :)

Cheers

Kristi said...

Regarding moving cameras: frame-by-frame stabilisation works just fine, as you described, but it's so slow. If you have access to a compositing program like After Effects, check out the tracking/stabilisation abilities that it has. (Industry standard is still Boujou, I think, but that's a single-purpose piece of software.) If you can get a good track out of your footage (YouTube footage may be tougher than average, due to its low definition) then you can make this part much faster. Good luck.

frank said...

Hey Ian

I've been surfing by the ARC Blog, haven't had much time on my hands to leave a comment. It's great to see you have a ramble about arcs. Don't ask me why. Ark, ark, nanu, nanu.

Thanks for doing these extra-curricular lessons in animation.

The "Rambles" link is such a bonus reference to have as an animation student.

Since I've been flipping pages, I have begun to see arcs. So I'm still at that stage where I am just recognising what an arc looks like.

Can you remember those days? When the basics of timing, drag, offsets and arcs were just being recognised?

Well, that's the level me, and I guess my classmates, are at. The step below some of the basic steps you enthuse us to understand.

We're getting there.

The next step is recognising the appeal. Your multiframe still shots are a great help with that in this Arcs ramble.

Carlos is correct you are an awesome poster. Almost as awesome as the Rat poster that's up in the studio ;)

Hi Kristi, Thanx for your comments.

Ian said...

Hey Frank

For me it was so different, I spent so long around animation as an inbetweener at Disney without anyone even being interested in what I might do creatively (thats TV style clean inbetweening as aposed to US feature rough inbetweening).

I was absorbing what other animators did for years before I got do do much animation myself. I would follow an animators instructions (inb ruffs) and then later on see the results and see why that got me to do it that way. Over and over and over for 4 years. Its so different now, sometimes I can hardly relate, thaks to technology now you just get thrown in the deep end.

You learn it the oposite way around to me. On the one hand thats much more exciting (trust me 4 or so years of inbetweening will test your patience), but its also soooo much harder.

When I studied, as long as you could through a few good drawings together you had a chance at a job, now you have to be ready for production.

frank said...

The change in the industry is a real concern.

There's a large gap where the 'on-the-job-training' should be.

I guess it is being filled, in part, by on-line classes, such as your own and AnimationMentor. Also there are some post-diploma lessons with bridging to the Bachelor of Animation at the Queensland College of the Arts.

I've got a real feeling of nausea in applying for a job, or maybe even getting a job, and the person paying me having unrealistic expectations of my skill level straight out of a 2 year Diploma.

Ian said...

Remember Frank, the rules may be changing, but they are changing for everyone. Its a tougher sport, but its still a level playing field :)