Today was, what could be considered, a large step into my animation history and experience - actual frames. Not the sort onion-skinned in Flash, not the sort done with tarty tracing paper. Actual light-box, peg-bar, hurried pencil tested frames.
Before that though, I was late up yet again in the morning in regards to my own time keeping.
7am is my intended time to arise but cold air entraps me to this eery state of warmth and safety - a fear to be born yet again into the real world. With my sessions in Principles starting at 10am, I decided to at least get up 50 minutes beforehand. Tea was on the menu alone. Marmite on toast would of been a nice compliment but alas my bread moulded up into a Cthulhu fuck-fest. :(
Principles in Animation today was pretty fun, actually. Robert tasked us with drawing various objects and actions that accentuated movement or weight. Running man, speeding car, and somehow a feather was some of this. The second task was to draw up two scenes (just bare with me here): one of a ball breaking through a window and bursting through a man's newspaper to his surprise, and even greater, a man on a table grabbing a table cloth for support whilst another person runs to support a falling vase.
The first scene I personally thought I got pretty on the spot, whilst the second was a failed attempt to cram all of the tasked actions into some dynamic wide-angle shot. I wasn't sure what else I was thinking other than "How the hell am I to sqeeze all of that into a single thumbnail?" Thinking back, I like how I decided to, for some reason, design the table-wobbling character as a blind man.
Was hoping for Rob to check my book for many errors and advice on improvements. He intended to get around people quicker this time, too. Nope. He still feels the need to go through all the specular, denizen details of the books. There was afternoon lesson for him to catch up with the rest but god damn, he couldn't even see me then!
Speaking of afternoon lesson - the former-mentioned bouncing ball exercise occurred. I arrived slightly late which was enough for almost all the light boxes to be taken. Paper was already being queued up for chopping, and I was kind of lagging on keeping up. But whatever? I eventually found a place, a spare peg bar and got cracking with the exercise.
Andy Joules (AKA John Locke) is our other teacher for Principles. He's something of a hard-boiled industry veteran. I wouldn't believe myself as first but hey - check out his showreel and some of his work dates back to the 70s. He's done a variety of adverts for the BBC, too. I love that one of What We Eat on BBC3! That's so clever.
Waffling aside, yeah. Andy told us the basics to get a ball bouncing in arcs and it was pretty effective.
The basis was to draw a line forming in arcs and to then drawing the balls going sequentially across, on one frame. We'd then use that frame as a standing point for where to draw in the ball for each individual frame.
Spacing (and to a lesser extent, squash and stretch) was important here and basically taught us the fundamentals of that vital knowledge. Most people finished up their ball bounce at 15-21 frames. I decided to be picky and 'soften' up the animation with an additional 17 or so frames; I suppose The Animation Survival Kit already forewarned me on how to space things accurately.
Once done - off to the mighty LINE TESTER. It's basically a slightly bigger light box with some fancy lamps around it as well as something to hold a camera. But this device really works a treat - the camera is hooked up to the iMacs and a stop-motion program called Dragon enables quick fires of digital capture to be taken with a simple press of the enter key. It was very neat and rewarding to see that scruffy ball of mine bounce across so fluently thanks to the extra added frames. Andy seemed to of found it alright - I'm happy he didn't (appear to have) any qualms about it.
Oh, yeah. When everyone left because of my impractical slowly-wins-the-race work ethic, a student I never met before came in whilst I was trying to rectify a stupid-ass screw up I made on Dragon. Her name was Sophie - she was a 2nd year student of animation! It was interesting and fun to talk to her about what she did over the course of her first year, and her tastes towards animation. She hopes to send an animation off to the film festival. I hope that'll happen, she seems to look like the sort with some great ideas tucked away. She was nice, hopefully I'll catch her again. (There was a 3rd year student that came in, too, albeit he jumped right into frantic work. Well, I can't wait for 3rd year at University now.)
Back home at Room 5, I was avid to see my compiled line test on my laptop. Too bad, then, that the .mov file seemed to of been corrupted. QuickTime back in the studio were informing me of something being amiss but I just sort of assumed it was the iMacs fault. (Besides, having a technical hiccup whilst meeting someone new is just awkward) I'll have to recompile the frames tomorrow.
Ah - and not only that. I'll have to contact System Administrators or something in Finance. Intended to pay part of my tuition fee before Thursday since the money came in today but several log-in failures and whoopee, the Pay Online system locked me out, that dick. ;_; Rent has to also be payed for back home, but my sister hasn't texted back some of the details for online RBS yet. On top of that, I need to e-mail my dad about Endsleigh - but I'll do that tomorrow once this has all been sorted. Oh! I can get my UCA card, too.
Had a spaghetti bolognese, pre-cooked. Was quite nice! Also experienced TokBox website after my housemate Sophie (not from before) brought it up again. Multi-chat convo, baby! Sounds like a hoot.
Kitchen is kind of messy again, though. Man, poor Roy - he cleaned up a lot of the stuff, too.
Just spent like a whole hour writing up this blog as well. Am I really going to be writing an essay like this each and every time? Hope not, fitting that into a schedule is going to be hella' fun otherwise.
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