Animation diary

Task: make a funny film in the mould of the silent films of the start of the 20th century. My main character will be a robot so the aesthetics will be far from 1910, so the main “selling” point will have to be the animation itself. Having looked at some old films I am further turned off the idea of trying to emulate one, not only are they black and white the films frame rate is low making the whole production look stiff and full of brakes. The actors themselves also seem to try there best to over exaggerate their movements making them look less human.

For my robot project I have decided to abandon the 20’s theme and replace it with an acne theme. Not only am I far more familiar with the loony toons I also think they are funnier. Given that the loony toons are also completely fictional there is also far less restraint. For the funny I think I’ll do something like the road runner cartoons. Where every one but the coyote know what’s about to happen until the last few seconds when whily figures it out but by then its far to late.

In the grand scheme of things I think I would want to be a modeller, I find great enjoyment creating the shapes and constructing the pieces, I would liken it the sculpting out of clay. The same can not be said about rigging, I have never sat down to accomplish a task that has given me more of a head ache. Know trial and error is the best way to learn and I have no problems with the trial bit it’s the error that does my nut in. I have discovered that with minimal input I can destroy any rig know to man

The importance of good rigging is now becoming apparent. I always thought that the point of programs like max was to make the animation easy, for max to do this your rig needs to be solid, mine is not. This means I have ended up correcting the movement frame by frame any way.

My final piece
I’m not entirely happy with my final piece as you can tell it was my first attempt as such at such a thing. I really need to learn how to rig as that is where I let myself down. If the rig was better the animation would have been to. Balls


MY Place IN the 3D pipeline
As it stands I said I wanted to be a modeller this has now changed. I think I can already model, given enough time and a bit of lateral thought you can make anything you want out of basic shapes and the lovely tool edit poly. Rigging is the skill I want to learn, any one can model but to take a model and bring it to like as it where is real skill and that’s what I am know aiming at.