Just like Jason, I'M BYAAACK!

Okay, little update for mah friends reading this! A few weeks ago, Kaitlin and I were walking from the store and we met this kid walking his dog. He asked if we wanted to pet it, and why would we ever say no to that? We struck up conversation, his girlfriend came out and talked too, and we invited them over to play board games/bake cookies with us! They were like, "Umm, maybe, we just got pizza, so we're gonna eat now, maybe though!" So with very little promise, we went back to her house (only a few houses down) and told the gang about what happened. 5 minutes later, a knock on the door! Woooooo! So we hung out with Dan and Kelly all night, they brought pizza, we all drank, played bananagrams, but most importantly just had flowing conversation for hours! He had some job thing in the computer field, and told me to apply in a couple weeks. And he also told me that he's into animation! Well, 3D animation, that is.

So I talked to him about it and whatever, and eventually realized that maybe I should try that. I've been getting so stressed out about 2D stuff, sort of figuring that I should keep that for people who know how to draw correctly and don't just wing doodles around. Of course I'm still gonna work on that, but for now, I'm going to attempt 3D stuff.

That being said, for the past ~week, I've been going buckwild on the program I need to learn, downloading as many high-class tutorials as possible, and doing what I can, whenever I can. Lemme tell you, 3D is craaaazy. But I'm loving it, I can get really really cool effects a lot faster than I though I would. I mean, it's REAAALLY hard, but not as stressful as trying to nail a solid drawing for each of the 24 frames per second. I'm really liking it. So I'll be bringing you some stuff I do on that, and I'll start it out with just a picture of what I've been working on. It's from a tutorial, so don't think that I'm creating this spectacular piece alone, it's very instructive, but yeah, anyway, here's a pic of what I've been working on through this tutorial, and I'll be updating a bunch more in the near future!

Uhhhh

So I haven't been doing nothing! I still work every day! I've been reading a textbook I found online and it has written lessons, so I've been doing those and hand-drawing a lot. I just really don't feel confident in my drawing abilities, and it's carrying over to animation. So while I do some exercises, I'm gonna be working a lot on just cartooning in general. So sorry for the no updates, but not really sorry. I'm confident in how my time is spent! I'll update when I have something worth updating.

Day 8

Okay! So a tough couple days, kinda getting ahead of myself a little and getting frustrated over it. But yeah, I did the first half of something I've wanted to animate for a while (don't ask me why) and I'm gonna finish it tomorrow. Sound effects and all! So here it is, work in progress:



So my home page when I open google chrome is this: http://animationsmears.tumblr.com/
I never thought that 24 frames per second would be too little to create smooth motion, but sometimes it is. And it's so cool to go to that site and see how those artists combat that. So it's really fun to think of ways to make fast motion smooth. I think there's still more I can do with this one, but I drew a few frames pretty cooool in that way.

Will finish this thing tomorrow!

Day 7

Wanted to do a completely straight-ahead visuals animation, so did this last night/this morning:



Then joined the 11 Second Club ( http://www.11secondclub.com/ ) which is really great, so I started to work on something for this month's contest. Gotta say, this is gonna be an INTENSE animation. But I really want to do it well, 'cause it'd be great for a demo reel. I really like the character I drew for it as well, so I've been going pose-to-pose for the past few hours trying to keep the character on-model. It's actually really annoying to keep the character on-model, especially with line thickness and just figuring out how to draw him when his head is turned a different angle.

But this is going to be my first real character animation with acting. I've spent a LOT of time just acting out myself what I want him to do. It's funny, when you act (or just express emotion [or just move]) in real life, there are so many overlapping actions you just take for granted. For example, your arm swings opposite your legs when you take a walk, but at a slightly different pace. Check out this picture from The Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams:

The first pose, the legs are at their widest. You'd think the arms would be too, but they don't reach the most extreme position until the third pose. So when you pay more attention to how things actually are, you can see that things move at different rates at different times. So when acting, I had to do the motions each time, kind of like, getting in character so I'd move naturally, and when I studied my movements, I saw that if I just animated it how I first thought he'd act, it would come out really awkward and unreal. So hopefully taking note of these things helps out a lot. I mean, it still might look awkward when I actually animate it 'cause I'm still beginner status, but my mind is there! So my skills will soon catch up!

Seeee ya tomorrow!

Day 6

Worked on a few things today, but made the most progress on this one:



Now I've been saying that I suck at drawing hands for a while, and I've practiced a little lately, but today I tried to animate a hand opening (not featured in the above video, I'm too embarrassed to show that, so you just see the lines I made as a guide) and it turned out extremely awful. Now, through trial and error I can draw something that looks hand-shaped, but I'm really inconsistent. So I started drawing some hands after the above failure, and gonna devote a lot of time this weekend to hand drawing.

Sorry if this blog is boring! I'm still very beginner and it takes sooo long to do stuff. And a lot of the stuff I do is rubbish, so you're only seeing the "good" stuff haha. Well it's to be expected! First full week of this is complete!

Day 5

Got lots of sleep last night haha, had a great day chillin' with house-folk on and off. But got my 8 hours in by 11pm! I decided to take some advice and copy another animation, see what they did. So I did that! I copied the first few seconds of the adventure time pilot. Here's what I did:



And here's the actual pilot:



So if this seems like a waste of time to people, I actually learned a lot from doing this! I learned when to animate on 1's or 2's a little more, and also adding in a 2 in the middle of some 1 action in order to get a move to like, POP. Like, when he does the flip up, I hold him getting out of the sleeping bag for 1 extra frame then the handstand into flip up on 1's.

Also got offered to be a subject for some psychology research for $200 wooo!

Day 4

Today was a shitty day. Very frustrating and didn't make progress on the things I wanted to. Halfway through the day, I switched over to something new. I painted a li'l background on photoshop and plotted out a run over the hills I drew.



Doing this was also ridiculously frustrating. Running in any form that isn't left to right, completely 2d is really hard. I drew it out multiple times until it felt kinda right. Tomorrow or later tonight I'm going to start drawing a real body over the stick figure, see how that looks. And I also want to continue the one from yesterday. I started working on it today but it didn't go very well/didn't get too far.

I'm hoping my next session is more productive/I feel more flowing. But I can't expect to have a good day every day!