Animation Mentor Student
In many ways, the Week 7 assignment was an extension of the previous week’s assignment. Last week had me animating a pendulum with overlapping action of the tail. It also had me procrastinating way too much for my own good. I made certain to get a head start on my work for Week 7, and also managed to rectify a few of the problems in the previous pendulum assignment. The improved version can be viewed in last week’s post here.
The primary assignment for this week was to animate a character called Tailor, which consisted of a ball with a squirrel-like tail. While the tail functions like a pendulum in many ways, it is also different (and more challenging) in that it has life and muscles to it. Therefore, I had to be conscious of overlap on the tail and the effects of gravity and drag on it without allowing it to look like a limp, lifeless appendage. I spent a lot of time planning this assignment out. I knew that I wanted to do something more than just a few meaningless bounces, and ideally I would have liked to tell a short story. However, I knew the dangers of spending too much time on the idea and too little time on the execution. As a middle ground to my two competing desires, I decided to retell a story that I had already told before in a previous animation called Nuttin’s Free. This would allow me to reuse some props and ideas so that I could get straight to animating.
Well perhaps not straight to animating. I did have to do some sketches to show what action Tailor was to do in the assignment. In previous weeks I had really enjoyed the fact that some of my classmates spent the time to do these sketches in Photoshop as opposed to just drawing quick and dirty thumbnails on paper. So I did the same thing in order to add an extra level of polish to my planning. Below you can see what I came up with. It very accurately depicts what would happen in my final animation.
Pretty planning, but this was also an example of form over function.
The planning above does some things right: I carefully document all of the important frame numbers, I show relational positions between frames and props, and I show accurate squash and stretch. A major problem with this planning, however, is that a lost sight of what the purpose of planning is. I was so intent on creating something that was nice to look at, that I forgot that planning should really be for my benefit alone. I shouldn’t have tried to impress my mentor and classmates with some colorful and computer-generated planning. I ended up wasting time that I could have spent on the actual animation. I could have done sketches that were just as functional by hand in much less time. Sure, they wouldn’t have looked as nice, but who cares? Thumbnails shouldn’t have to be pretty. It’s also important to note that I messed up a bit on the Tail Cycle. Because I tried to cram everything onto the page without creating messy overlap between my drawings, my tail positions are off, most noticeably on frame 45. The tail should drop down below the level it is at on frame 44. I should never have changed a thumbnail just so that it looks nicer in the planning. The only purpose of planning is to benefit the animation. I’ll remember this from now on.
At least I left myself enough time to animate this week. Yet I still hadn’t grasped the idea of overlapping action completely. I understood it in theory, but couldn’t yet put it on paper, so to speak. I initially thought that I did a pretty decent job on my first pass animation. Below you can see what I came up with.
However, there’s a lot wrong with this picture, as my mentor was sure to point out. The tail is quite stiff throughout, and at times the focus of the piece gets lost among all the additional props and scenery detail. Yet again, form over function. In the first few frames of the animation, there’s no reason at all to obscure Tailor’s tail with the leaves of the tree, except that I wanted a lot of leaves. The purpose of the assignment though was to highlight the motion of a squirrel tail. My revision the following week fixed a few of these issues, simplifying the idea and removing a lot of needless clutter.
The tail could use some tune-up still, that’s for certain. It’s still a little stiff in a few instances when flying through the air. However, it at least is a big improvement on the previous week, and it’s good enough to allow me to leave it alone and focus on the assignment coming up for Week 8.