WIP--ANIMATION(Traditional)

[Ian Mack]

http://art.basementlife.net/movie/Ian-yawn.mov


It's still very rough. What you're seeing is the 9 keys of the animation. They're spaced out in a rough timing of the animation which has to be 4 seconds long.

Do you think the high point of the yawn could be exxagerated more? Could I maybe show more squashing/stretching anywhere? Any comments would be helpful and appreciated.

The file is 8megs and it's QT. :p

[Hunger_Artist]

heheh. ok

1st off. DONT make a simple 9 frame animation 8 megs!

try compressing/croping the action, and compress it using sorinson or cinepak. You could easily make this baby 100k wihout much reduction in quality...

as for the animation itself, Im not an expert, but u should probably work on getting your frames cleaner. I dont mean to sound harsh, but this is what I see that can be improved..

[egerie]

Yeah for a line test it's way too big :) Try cropping and reducing the size to 50% for next time.. and use the codecs Hunger_Artist suggested.

Now as for the animation. The guy looks more like he's an enthusiastic fan cheering his hometown quarterback. Kinda.
You might want to take special attention of what you do exactly when you yawn and stretch. I'm sure it can happend a few times during a day especially if you spend it on top of an animation disc ;)
So next time this happends, register what you're doing exactly. How is your body moving and where your head is when you do so. Are you arching your back ? Unravelling your arms in an arc when you finished stretching ? Yawning and tilting your head on the side ? Is there a pause during the most intense part of the yawn and stretching ? Do your body seem to sloush back to working position in a relaxed manner after this ?

You see, to convey the idea of a yawn isn't so hard to do. But to make it look convincing, you really got to pay attention on the essence of the action. A yawn can be hard to do but you can keyframe some of your own expressions from a mirror. Yawn, watch in the mirror what's happening on important moments (like apex of the situation, then how you get there and finally how you go from apex back to normal.).
It's like practicing anatomy ; always work from reference if you want to make it look correct.

And remember, a good yawner makes 10 yawn. Aha that was a bad translation :D
That's my advice, make what you want of it :)

P.S.: I might be able to find an old keyframing I did of a planet having to yawn somewhere..

[Ian Mack]

Sorry about the size...I was thinking about that too after I left school. I'll figure out how to crop it when I update.

Hunger Artist: it'll be much cleaner by the end. This is still at a very rough stage.

Egerie: Thanks for the tips. I'm reworking my keys now and I'll upload the new dwg's when I'm done. That series of questions really helped me when I was watching myself yawn.

[Ian Mack]

Here are the new keys I came up with. It's not in movie format because I'm @ home.
1http://art.basementlife.net/images/yawnkey01.gif
2http://art.basementlife.net/images/yawnkey02.gif
3http://art.basementlife.net/images/yawnkey03.gif
4http://art.basementlife.net/images/yawnkey04.gif
5http://art.basementlife.net/images/yawnkey05.gif
6http://art.basementlife.net/images/yawnkey06.gif
7http://art.basementlife.net/images/yawnkey07.gif

Key3 is the apex of his yawn, Key4 is him really getting into the stretch of the yawn.

between Key5 and 6, his limbs fall loosely to his side as he slouches down (there is some squashing on his body)

and Key7 is him rising to his original position.

Any comments? suggestions?

And does anyone know of a good way to do linetest on a home pc ? Scanning these in takes quite awhile. : p

[egerie]

Well that's quite an improvment! Your first 5 keys are a heck of a lot better. Now I know sometimes we're eager to get the character back in it's original position as quick as possible (read 'with as less drawings possible' ;) ) but think about how much time the character would take traveling back into the yawn and then going back down. Keep your dope sheet nearby..

between Key5 and 6, his limbs fall loosely to his side as he slouches down (there is some squashing on his body)
Indeed ! Altho the images seem to be scanned at different sizes so.. I can only venture to think you kept your character on model ? I mean when there's a stretch or a squash, the body itself keeps the same volume. If you squash it, be carefull not to make it look more 'inflated'.
One other thing that might help is doing clean layout poses of your character. Just the 3 important ones but where you're absolutely certain they're on model and in a credible pose. For example pose (1) = Idle character -which will be your reference
pose 2 = apex
pose 3 = character back down being completely relaxed and ready to get back in idle position.
Remember, if you take time to draw a character doing something it has to do it for a reason. Immerse yourself in it. What is the character thinking ? "Oh gosh I'm tired from working on that thing for 14 hours. I have a kink in my uper back and my proximal metacarp hurts. What will I cook myself tonight ?" :D There are 2487567 things that go trough one person's mind and it's what makes them look real :)
Maybe it's a bit too early to bombard yourself with questions now tho..

As for the exageration of the yawn.. er well remember that you might want to make a significant pause at the apex (depending on where you want your animation to go that is).

And does anyone know of a good way to do linetest on a home pc ? Scanning these in takes quite awhile. : p
What do you use at work/school ? Xsheet with a rigged camera ? The only way I found at home to do this is to tape a peg bar on the scanner's edge and speed scan the drawings one after the other (same crop, grayscale, low-res). I would then dump them in director and line test there.. That's a very easy and cheap way to do it. Other than that if you have a camcorder you might want to read the manual to see if it's capable of doing stop motion or snapshots.
If you have money to throw out the window there's Retas or other animation programs but the scanning remains the same.
If anyone has another suggestion I'd be curious to know too :)

Btw, I don't pretend to have the exact science of animation but I sure do hope my suggestions will help you try to make anyone get better and better by making them ask themselves questions.
That disclaimer out of the way :D, there's a book every animator should have on their desk and that's The Animator's Survival Kit - by Richard Williams (director of animation 'Who Framed Rodger Rabbit'. It's an absolute bible book and totally worth it.

Have to run..

[Ian Mack]

I'll take that into account Egerie. They way I drew these keys is whenever there is a change in direction, or stop. Hmm, maybe I'll make his head trail a little as his body moves up.

And yea, I did scan them in @ different sizes. He's still on model for that pose. Once I have the keys completed in roughs, I'll be cleaning them up. Starting with the 3 poses you suggested.

Those are good questions you're asking. It really drives home the point that you have to live your animation for it to live. I'll definitely remember them when I'm going through and tightening the details.

I'm using a fixed camera and a program called Linetest @ school. I have nothing @ home but my scanner and Adobe Imageready. : p I'll try taping an extra pegbar to my scanner and that should help me to get the same size in my scans. Good idea on that one !

And I'll look into that book. Thanks for your help, it's been instrumental in keeping focused on the assignment. I've been feeling really lost so having someone who knows what they're doing give me tips is wonderful.

[egerie]

:thumb:

[Ian Mack]

Got a new movie. Only 2megs this time. : p

http://art.basementlife.net/movie/Ian-Yawn.mov

These are all my keys and a couple of secondary poses. The motion looks pretty smooth to me. My next step is to do cleaned up versions of the keys and then I'll probably start in-betweening.

[Hunger_Artist]

the "key" is to keep the "keys" as clean as possible.. if you have inconsistent lighting on some animated frames, each of thoes different lighted pixels is just a whole lot of unused data. If your taking pictures of em now, I suggest you try scanning for better quality.

[Ian Mack]

Originally posted by Hunger_Artist
the "key" is to keep the "keys" as clean as possible.. if you have inconsistent lighting on some animated frames, each of thoes different lighted pixels is just a whole lot of unused data. If your taking pictures of em now, I suggest you try scanning for better quality.

The cameras that I am scanning on @ school are of dubious quality. and and there shouldn't be any lighting, are you referring to the big grey patches ?

[Hunger_Artist]

YES!

It would be much more efficient if your frames were all white mostly, instead of lots of different greyish pixels in the background. All the light hitting the page unevenly is causing a reduction in quality and in increase in size. ( you could try upping the contrast to help, too)

[Ian Mack]

After alot of fiddling around with camera settings, that was the best that i could get. I may be able to make it smaller, but these are shitty cameras. o_O

[egerie]

You're improving exponetially otherside !
Just remember to slowdown or make pauses in the appropriate parts of your animation :)
Congrats on the size reducing by the way ehehe.. and to continue on the technical nitpicking, get rid of that white outline and you'll save even more space !
As for the grey on the keys.. As long as you can see your line-test properly, use your time to draw/animate more instead of trying to make the shots perfect. After all, the reason of a line-tester is to be fast and helpfull.. not producing superquality motion tests.

[Ian Mack]

Finished! And handed in ! I ran out of time and had to rush the final stage of the process.

http://art.basementlife.net/movie/Ian-yawn02.mov

This one is 9megs again. I didn't have time to linetest it twice before I handed it in.

Let me know what ya think !

[KayCustomz]

egerie's gif keeps getting my attention to read anything I can't read anything cuase of it

[egerie]

KayCustomz : LOL !

otherside : Wow you really came a long way :) Now be carefull when you're going back on key. And for pauses, try to use 3 (or 4) retraces instead of two in order to avoid the "flashing" effect. The fingers of his left hand and the inside of his mouth are a nice touch by the way !

[Ian Mack]

thx for the comments. The left hand thing came spur of the moment. I had 10 more frames to work with and I wanted to make the climax of the yawn more interesting.