This week we learned about Anticipation and Squash & Stretch. The video lecture was pretty cool. To show the importance of anticipation they had a bunch of videos of people jumping, playing golf, throwing balls, etc, but they cut out all of the frames with anticipation in it. It was funny watching people jump in the air without crouching down first to store up energy for the jump. My favorite ones were of the person playing golf. He lined up for his shot and then all of a sudden he hit the ball without even pulling the club back. Funny stuff.

The squash & stretch stuff was interesting too. Most of it was review, but it was interesting to hear it again. I figure if I hear it enough times it should stick eventually.

The assignment this week was a long one. We were required to plan out and animate a basketball/soccerball bouncing through a provided obstacle course. Sounded pretty easy…..but it was by far the hardest assignment so far. I found myself cursing at and flipping off my monitor more times than I can remember in the hopes that Maya would cooperate. I fought the Graph Editor almost the whole time. Those damn curves wouldn’t go the way I wanted them. Sorry, for some of you none animators reading my blog…..wait does anyone besides my mom read my blog?.......anyway, for those of you that aren’t familiar with Maya, there is a Graph Editor that essentially shows all of your animation in the form of curves. It’s a hard tool to master because its really difficult to figure out what your animation is doing when you are staring at a bunch of curves on a graph. I’ve tried to avoid the graph editor as much as I could in the past and I think that’s partially why my animation has sucked. I’m glad we are starting off with something easy like a bouncing ball so I can learn to utilize the graph editor or at least fight it less.

With this assignment I blocked out everything in pose to pose and then adjusted my timing in the graph editor. Then I went back to the animation, put in my breakdowns, and returned to graph editor again. The rest of my time was spend here, tweaking points and tangents. For some of the animation, my pose to pose stuff was fine, but for a majority of it, I found that I was fighting to get it working right. I ended up throwing out most of my poses and working in a layered fashion, getting the timing of each component of the movement before moving on to the next. I worked on this bad mamma jamma for way too long and I’m happy to finally be finished with it. I learned a lot in this assignment, so hopefully if I have to do something like this in the future, I won’t do as much fight and cursing as I did this time.

The other parts of the assignment were to sketch some dynamic poses, sketch some devastating poses, and pose Stu is our favorite devastated pose. Man, finding poses this week was hard. Most of the magazines that I looked through didn’t have much of anything useful. I tried looking up pictures on the internet, but that was a bust because most people don’t label their pictures with “dynamic” or “devastated.” I would’ve probably been better off going to a softball game or watching people play in the park.

I apologize if this post is bit esoteric, but it would take a long time to explain everything and frankly I don’t think anyone would benefit from my ramblings about things like curves, tangents and the like. So with that, I give you……pretty pictures.