ANIM 619 - First assignments

One of the classes I am taking this semester is called "Animation Mechanics." Essentially, I am learning all about motion and how the Disney animators managed to create a whole philosophy behind how to animate cartoons. I'll be doing a lot of traditional animation in this class like stop-motion photography and hand drawn pencil tests. I ultimately don't aspire to be an animator, but rather a 3D modeler and rigger (I'll explain what those people do in some other post). So why am I taking this course? I asked myself the same question a while ago, but now I realize that I don't have a great understanding of how things actually move. How can I expect to build the right model/rig without knowing how something is supposed to react when a force is applied to it?

Well, onto the gallery. One of the first assignments I did was a stop-motion animation using clay that depicted a simple bouncing ball:

I had so much fun doing that, that I decided that I would elaborate on it for my second assignment, which was to do a freeform animation, pretty much anything I wanted. I decided to see how hard it would be to animate multiple balls at the same time... it turned out to be harder than I thought. I almost lost track of things in all the ensuing chaos. I also was a bit too ambitious and decided to shoot on ones. That means animating all 24 frames in a second. Disney animators back in the day typically shot on twos, which means two frames for each drawing (essentially 12 frames a second, but let's not get technical here).

The first animation you see is roughly 100 frames long, yet it is only four seconds when played to speed. The second animation is 120 frames long, but it only lasts for five seconds. Together , both of these took me all morning to finish. (Admittedly, I had to take a nap when I was done in order to recover my eyes.) Just think how long it would make to do something like The Adventures of Mark Twain. It took experts roughly three and a half years to complete it. I have a newfound respect for the pioneers of animation.

Also I need to say thank you to my parents for getting me a set of Will Vinton Clay-Mation clays when I was a teenager. It only took ten years, but I finally got to use them for animation.