November | 2015 | the pied pixel

Animation is something I would love to do. There is no greater feeling to me than to make an audience connect personally with a character. To me, it is the ultimate magic trick! Since I am striving to become a character animator, I put in an extra effort to earn a grade that would reflect this.

FOA made us focus on applying the fundamentals of 2D animation into 3D. We were provided several basic rigged characters to animate doing certain tasks. Our final was to animate just the lower half of a character kicking a ball. The ball also would need to be keyframed bouncing along through a specific course. For this, we had to give the character and the ball a sense of weight. Our instructor required us to film ourselves acting out the motion, and then to go through and designate specific key poses and breakdowns. We were then asked to draw out these actions as individual thumbnail sketches to use as our animation reference. Both of the linked projects below were given grades of 100%.

Here is one of my projects which involved animating the top-half of a character – the torso, arms and head:

Final Project:

This traditional animation course was great. It was taught by two passionate instructors from the industry with some impressive credentials. The 12 principals of animation were driven into us for eight hours every class. The concept of timing is everything in animation, as an animator with poor timing is not an animator. Before this class I had never taken a 2D animation course, but now I am very convinced that in order to become a successful animator in 3D, one must learn 2D.

Here are a couple warm-up sketches we had to do based upon a certain subject. The sketch must tell a story.

Storytelling Drawing – Draw people in a line…

2DA_party