Yes another post about drawing. I am waiting in our animation building waiting for the figure drawing session to start. However, I can't stress enough the importance of figure drawing. Learn your anatomy, work with lines of action, poses, and simply pick up the pencil and do it. All you really need to do is one sketchbook page a day (15-20 min.) and I promise you will see results over time. Especially for those who want to be animators, learn figure drawing, because it is the bases for everything you need for animation. [Weight, line of action, pose... the works]
In addition, here is yet another fine text written for animators. It really is a good resource for strengthening weight in poses, along with lines of action.
Our last assignment in ANIM I was to create a piece of seaweed sliding across the page, settling, then sliding back to its starting position, and then getting it to loop. It was somewhat of a tedious assignment, but overall one that I enjoyed. The main principles that we looked at were the drag on an object when it goes from rest to in motion, as well as the concept of it briefly remaining in motion and coming to rest (which we would refer to as follow through and overlapping action). Here is the piece that I did. It really is an important concept and I will hopefully show you how to apply it within our next assignment that I'm working on.
Sorry for not posting for awhile, but I wanted to share that we had the privilege of seeing the Animation Show of Shows last night. Ron Diamond, an executive at ACME Filmworks and the man who started AWN was here to present it last night. Apparently he has been doing this for ten years now and it has been a big success. He felt that many animators working within the industry never got to see any of the outside shorts that were being produced and displayed in competitions worldwide. So, each year he puts together a compilation of the best animated shorts within the past 1-2 years. He said that he even turns down shorts from studios like Pixar and Disney... Anyway, it was a great show with many interesting works. Here are the films that were shown last night.
If you get a chance look some up (probably on youtube) and see for yourself. I feel as an animator it's always good to know about current animations that are successfully created. [ Also, they were selling DVDs and box sets from previous years which I think you can order online so if you're interested I'm sure you can buy some of these animations for your own library collection ]
My current assignment is to work on a wave cycle. Basically focusing on overlapping action and follow thru. It's a fairly simple assignment, but is KEY in creating fluid animations. Our assignment was to sketch 10 pgs in our sketchbook of wavy lines and any examples were there is a waving movement. Then we have to choose one to animate. The simplest one is a blade of seaweed that waves back and forth and get it to cycle.
For better and illustrated examples of this principle refer to pages 301-302 in the Animator's Survival Kit.
There is good source that my professor referenced for us and his name is Michel Gange. Check out his site at http://www.gagneint.com/
Here is one of his works that I'm sure you have seen and I am really fond of. Michel actually is really talented at creating hand drawn effects which can be very fun to play with. Now a days, we have all of these programs to do fancy particle effects, but I really dislike them and think they're rather cheesy. However, in the good old days they had to create these effects by hand, and I feel there is a wonderful aesthetic to these unique creations. Check out Michel's Film Prelude to Eden.
So check out these sources and when I get the chance I'll add to this post with the work I did and some examples of how to draw such an assignment.
