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!

Day 3

So today might not seem like the most productive of days, not even finishing 4 seconds of work, but it was actually the best day yet! I ran into a lot of problems on this one, but solved all of them! It's not finished yet, so the last few frames I'm definitely gonna redo. The kick doesn't POP yet. But I've got some ideas for this one that'll be cool, and I'll probably work on this a lot tonight or tomorrow.



So after today's work, I'm a lot more confident. Excited to keep doing this!

Day 2

So my second full day of animation went like this:



As well as posing some characters for flowerpot spins which takes longer than I expected. And started another project but didn't get too far in it yet, so I'm not gonna post any of that.

I'm gonna work on movement more tomorrow, today was reintroducing myself to the whole embedded objects thing. Tomorrow will probably be just like, walk cycles/head turns/moving arms and stuff. Get used to doing those things so I can incorporate them nicely into the fun things.

Day 1

The first thing I did was take pictures of cardboard I painted waves onto and layered them and made'm wave for a li'l sea scene. I had a project a while ago I wanted to do, and now I'm playing around with it in ze animation world. Just a li'l test of what hand-painted cutouts look like.



Then did an obviously Don Hertzfeldt inspired cartoon thing. Really fun. Tried to practice some squash/stretch, drag, timing and spacing, eye-blinks, head turn, and pacing in a whole scene. And it's in squigglevision haha. Enjoy:



I think it was a pretty swell first day. Hopefully I can only go up from here.

Intro

So I got to Binghamton Wednesday evening and walked a few miles to the house. It was sick seeing everyone, me and Jordan cleaned and reorganized a bunch, I did some laundry, ate some foood, watched the presidential debate, went to a show at cyber cafe for a bit, did my first food shopping ($25, lets see how long it lasts), then slept, hoping to wake up early and get the rest of my stuff done. Oh I set up my desk just like last year:

I woke up and fell right back to sleep. Got everything done in the afternoon and did some drawing, but fell asleep again haha. It was gooood catching up on ZzZs anyhow. Hung out with the house at night, made some dinner, watched interviews with animators and stuff, eventually went to sleep, ready for my first full day of animation. Oh yeah, the point of being up here is to animate at least 8am-4pm every weekday, and however much I want any other time.

 So every post from now on will be less words and more videos/pictures of what I did each day. Have fun checking out a beginner animator do some crappy animations for a while! Hopefully you can see me get better haha.