Lecture day and preparaion for show and tell.

Today's lecture was on walks since that is the next task after the poses. We saw a few video examples of walks, my personal favourites where to videos by Richard Williams (author of the "Animator's Survival kit" and animation director on "Who framed Roger Rabbit") which showed a lot of walks, but also how fun and interesting it can be to study people for improving your animations.

What I remember best from the lecture is that you can have an exaggerated walk in your animation, it's both more appealing and entertaining, but if you don't have a realistic walk to sculpt the exaggerated walk from, it with all end up looking unrealistic and unappealing.

We also went out of the classroom for half an hour to study people and how they walk.
We could chose ourselves how we wanted to take our notes, so I did some really rough sketches and added additional notes to them to help me remember later on.
Here is an example of a few of the walk-poses I managed to sketch down:



(It's probably hard to read anything out of these sketches without the additional text that belongs to them, but it's mainly posted here to illustrate how I go about when I do my observations.)


I also brought my "ball with tail"-animation with me to the lecture today and got some more feedback on it. A few minor changes was suggested. So when I got back from the university I got rid of the squirrels reaction when it lands on the box and instead of it stretching and the tail goes stiff it now moves/slides over to the edge, wiggles the tip of his tail and jumps down on the nut. I think it worked out better this way as well so the feedback was very useful. It also shows that the squirrel is aware of the nut falling down and is determined to catch it instead of being surprised by it.

I have rendered the version I will be bringing along to tomorrows show and tell and you can view it here:



Now I am going to leave the laptop alone for a while and start planning the next task at hand; the poses.