Thursday 12 July 2012

A Bit of Animation Research...

Over the summer so far I've been watching various lovely animations and it's really got me itching to make one myself.  It is one of the reasons I joined this course after all and I feel that if I don't make one soon then I probably never will.

So, to help catch up skill wise I've borrowed Alan's Felix rig to try my hand at animation. I've only done one animation so far and that's the pirouette you can see below:



It's a bit too slow and really wobbly. I think I started his foot in the wrong place and I was trying to fix it, but I enjoyed doing it and I'm looking forward to trying out more gestures and other various animated movements.

This got me thinking about what I'd like to animate though. I was leaning towards something elegant, maybe a dance sequence, that really draws its appeal from a piece of music, but I wasn't entirely sure so I thought I'd start looking at various royalty free pieces from musopen. This lead me to a piece of music by Maurice Ravel:



There are 3 different versions of the same piece in that video because they each have a different tone to them. The first is a lonely, quite melancholy but potentially quite bittersweet piece, the second is one that tells more of a story of new discovery, and the third is again quite lonely but it also feels like it's telling a story. Also, the title has fairy tale connotations so I was pretty much won over by that.

I'll think more on this over the summer and hopefully I'll have an idea nicely formed by the time we start our minor project. In the meantime I'll toddle on with more Sea Witch work and animation experiments, maybe even do a little more work on Inari if I get a chance. Onwards and upwards! :D

2 comments:

  1. onwards and upwards indeed, Molly - I think it's fab that you're getting stuck into animation now - just keep at it. It can be difficult to maintain focus when there's not a proper deadline or cause, but give yourself an achievable structure and keep chipping away, because the confidences you'll gain will be their own reward :)

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    1. Agreed! Just gotta make sure I don't let myself slip again :)

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