AM Class 1 - Week 6

So this week was all about overlapping action, which is another principle that helps your animation stop looking mechanical or stiff. The principle of overlapping action basically says, "Not everything happens at the same time, dude. One thing will start moving, then the next thing will and then the next. Or one thing will stop, like your body, but your head and hands and clothes and hair may keep moving forward for a second before they settle. And they all probably won't settle at the same time."

This sounds like a simple enough principle, but it can be really difficult to make look believable, and it can be easily overlooked when your working in a pose to pose method where everything is keyed on the same frame. Not to mention, there's a ton of different ways to go about adding overlapping action into your shot. You could do it using breakdowns, or by offsetting keys, or by layering your animation by starting at the base and working your way up a chain, etc. There's lots of freedom in how you do it and that will affect what it looks like in the end.

Our assignment this week was to plan out a animation of a pendulum with three links in it, and then of course, to animate it. It wasn't quite that simple though. The base of the pendulum had to start and stop moving, and we had some freedom in how it moved. There were a lot of creative ideas I saw other students do, but I decided to stick with the school's suggestion of just doing a figure-eight motion. I think I'm going to try to be more creative with my assignments in the future. I've been doing the simple ones so far for a reason though: These assignments are meant to hammer in the basics so we learn how to animate well; they aren't exercises in creativity, they're exercises in mechanics; they're not going on my demo reel, they simply serve to teach me how to animate different types of motion. It's like, doing a sit-up at the gym in some oddly creative way isn't going to build any more muscle than doing a plane old, vanilla sit-up. In fact, the creative process may take away from what you're really supposed to be focusing on, which is the simple mechanics of doing a proper sit-up. That said, there is something about being creative even on the simple stuff that appeals to me. So I'll try to make these a little more entertaining and creative from here on out. For now, here's my pendulum animation.

This is the planning I drew out before actually animating.


Here's the animation.