Lianne Cruz

I can’t believe we’re already halfway through the term! This week’s lesson was overlapping action, so we had to animate a pendulum with the block as the driving force. It was a fun assignment, and I got a lot of great feedback from my mentor. Unfortunately, all these quicktime videos I’m posting are before crit. One day when I get the time to work on the revisions, I’ll post ’em…but for now, you’ll have to put up with the raw form:

Last Friday, AM hosted a Q & A session with animators from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend it. The animation style is fun and the humor is wonderfully silly. They discussed their workflow, visual references, and showed a couple deleted shots they worked on from the movie. They also showed pages from the Cloudy artbook which I now want to buy. One of their main points of reference for visual style were the old UPA cartoons back in the 1950’s: graphic, strong silhouettes, and flat colors. They explained how their tech helped them achieve that style in 3d which was incredibly interesting. Another thing I found interesting was that the animators were responsible for any cloth/prop that interacted with their characters; for example, the jello scene was hand keyed.

Since we are halfway through the term, I just wanted to go over things I’ve learned/need to work on:

• Timing and Spacing – I’m still in that rut where all my timing and spacing turns out even. I think it’s because of the way I block; I make all the poses first and then I start positioning the poses for the timing. The problem is I don’t do enough of part 2! I need to really exaggerate and push the timing so it’s clearly varied. Also, it’s better to make really exaggerated timing and ease it back than start out floaty all-around.
• Posing – Looking at real life and doing tons of sketches helps a lot…a lot. I still need to keep looking for that line of action, tho, and accentuate it.
• K.I.S.S. – As my friend, Jenny, would joke: “Remember to K.I.S.S!” It’s true and hard to do. I’m usually kicking myself on Friday night because I bit off more than I could chew. My mentor stresses ‘Simplicity and Clarity’, and even at the Cloudy Q and A, the animators said to look for 1 or 2 golden poses for your shot and not to have your shot stand out from the rest for film consistency’s sake. At AM, we’re given frame limits for each assignment (avg. around 120 frames/ 5 seconds) so you eventually learn you can’t cram in your epic good vs. evil bouncing ball story into an assignment. 😉 I also think since we’re all trying to make the animation interesting for ourselves, we tend to forget that this is called Foundations class for a reason. If you don’t demonstrate knowledge of each principle covered, then it doesn’t matter about the bells and whistles.
• Materials/Weight – It’s important to know what your objects are made of so you can animate the correct weight. Is it a light, airy ball or a heavy bowling ball? My pendulum received crits on this particular subject because the weight of the little ball looked both heavy and light throughout the assignment.
• Compromises – For me, there’s a lot to balance right now: a full-time (relatively new) job, school, long distance relationship, and family visitations. I can’t do everything. There will be days when coming home from work I’m drained, and sometimes I can’t see my loved ones as often as I’d like to. Going into this I knew what to expect, but in practice it’s a challenge juggling it. It’s going to be even harder with the holidays coming up, but I know next semester I will probably have to make some compromises.
• Time Management – And this leads into time management. I’m ashamed to say that I haven’t been the best at it lately. Luckily, there’s some really useful info online to keep me in line.

So onto the 2nd half of the semester, and hopefully with the lessons learned I will improve!