Production Principles – Traditional Animation

For traditional animation I had to do a selection of different tasks in order to better my understanding of timing, spacing, pose to pose and straight ahead animation.

For the first task we had to create a straight ahead animation based on too random words. Using a random word generator I was assigned the words “identical cotton” which turned out to be pretty fun! I began by drawing a little cotton ball or cloud in the center of the page, placing it on the lightbox and pegbar along with a field guide. Then, I just drew what I felt like in the moment; I ended up with a sort of explosion ending with lots of eel-like shapes which I think look very cool. Overall, this was a fun, informative exercise that went smoothly and allowed me to practice my animation skills.

Next, I created a pose to pose animation revolving around three facial expressions. Right away you can see that I should have made each expression more extreme. Drawing emotions, especially strong ones, is something I really struggle with. I tried to combat this by making the hair ’emote’ – curling with anger, flattening back down as the character looks up, etc. I really like this effect and think it works well! If I were to do this again though I’d definitely make the expressions more extreme.

After this, I used the same pose to pose animation and created a corresponding straight ahead background in order to exaggerate the emotions of the scene. I’m decently happy with this but feel I could have done a bit more.

Next, I did a pose to pose animation that included easing in and out. This was a real challenge. Unfortunately it didn’t come out as good as I wanted it to but that just means I need more practice. I think I’d have to repeat this exercise many times to get a feel for it to make it better.

Final Reflection:

Note: this is the same writing from my final production principles PDF.

My straight ahead animation outcome is more successful than my pose to pose one, although both are a good start to my future animations works. I need to loosen up my sketches in order to push my expressions to a much higher degree to create convincing and believable emotions, but have the technical knowledge to do so with more practice. If I were to do this again I would create much more emotive keyframes for my pose to pose work, and try to add even more elements to my straight ahead one.

I wanted to create a magic based animation for this rotation; a person with smoke or fire-like tendrils that open up into eyes before fizzling away. I think it had a lot of potential as a concept, and it was very fun to work on without being overly ambitious. Picking this concept gave me a better understanding of movement, but if I were to do this again it would have been interesting to include something with even more movement.

I have some experience with both pose to pose and straight ahead animation from my foundation year, although had not yet made a film I was entirely happy with at the time, so I entered this process with a lot of excitement. I learnt so much about effectively planning and executing movements, as well as how other animators worked. I would have liked to do more of these exercises to improve my movement skills, so will be practicing regularly in order to achieve this.

Overall I had a great experience with this rotation, and learned several key skills for animation. If I were to do this again I’d want to exaggerate my keyframes more to enhance the emotion and movement of each piece, but I think this is a good start.