A Flash of Inspiration

I have discovered recently that many studios use Flash for their projects. Inspired by this, I have decided to have a go at using Flash myself. I had heard a bit about Flash being used for animation before and I gathered that it was like 3D animation software but for the 2D medium. Upon trying it out for myself, I discovered this was pretty much correct. You create objects and make key frames. The computer then interpolates between these (by a process called 'Tweening') to fill in the animation. Of course, this is hardly traditional animation. However, it is possible to animate more traditionally in Flash by drawing every frame. I would assume that a studio would use a combination of the two methods.

I have to say, I didn't find Flash straight forward to use. I didn't have a book to follow so I just tried to figure it out with the help files and by experimenting for myself. I figured out how to produce a bouncing ball, and so here it is:The ball is just a circle of course. I used the automatic 'tweening' to move the ball down and up and manually altered frames for the squash and stretch. It turned out to be really easy to make this, but it took me ages to figure it out. As I had assumed, it is similar to animating in 3D, although the 3D software such as Maya are far easier to figure out, even though they are infinitely more complicated!

A Decent Descent

I contacted Kevin Langley a few days ago, telling him how much I like his blog, Goober Sleave. We got to chatting via email and I mentioned that I wasn't sure whether to concentrate fully on improving my drawing, or whether to try a bit more actual animation. He suggested that I do both, so to that end, I am currently animating a short scene.

Another blog I came across on my travels around the internet was that of Boris Maras called The Blog of Boris. He has just started an animation course at Sheridan College in Canada and has posted his first few animation assignments on his blog (see this post). I decided that I might follow in his footsteps and try to repeat those assignments for myself. The first is balls of different materials falling onto a block and bouncing. I have done a bouncing ball before (see this post) but I haven't tried varying the timing to suggest a different type of ball, such as a bowling ball. I'll post the result when I've finished it!

In the mean time, I got to thinking of the best way to work out the position of the ball in each frame of animation. In my version of the animation, the ball will be initially falling vertically, meaning that there are two key drawings showing it's initial position before beginning its descent and its squashed position on the surface of the block. I calculated that this should require nine frames, meaning seven frames between the two keys. So how do I know where to put the ball in each of these frames? Obviously the ball spends more time at the top of the drop than at the bottom as it takes time to accelerate. According to the chapter on pendulums in The Animator's Toolkit, it is done by putting the ball in frame 8 at the midpoint between key frames 1 and 9. The ball in frame 7 then goes at the midpoint between frames 1 and 8, and so on.

Being trained as a physicist, I wasn't really happy with this. Whilst it is easy to animate this way, it doesn't give a completely accurate representation of a falling ball. Therefore I decided to make up my own method. The two methods are compared in this quick drawing:
My method involves drawing a circle with a radius equal to the height that the ball drops. Nine lines are then drawn at equal intervals from the centre of the circle to its edge, but just in one quarter. The ends of these lines are then extended horizontally to give the height of the ball in each frame. As you can see from the picture, this gives a very different result to that achieved by the method in The Animators Toolkit! Animating the ball in this way will give a perfectly accurate descent.

Clearly my method takes a lot more planning out than Richard Williams's. Thus I started to think about whether his method gave any other benefit other than being quick. The only thing I could think of is that it is much more obvious in his version that the ball is initially moving slowly and then moving fast. Can some of you please comment on this and maybe shed some light on the situation?

Back to Life

Back to the life drawing! Sian and I went to a drawing session again tonight, so I'm posting my results on here for you all to see.

The first is a 30 minute pose, roughed out in blue pencil and tidied up in graphite. I decided to have a rest from using charcoal, and since I have had some success with drawing hands in pencil, I thought I'd try it here.
I started the picture several times, unable to get the proportion right. I guess I was a little out of practice, having missed a session last week. I finally got something that looked about right (apart from the stunned face!). Next, there were a series of one minute poses. I have never had to draw that quickly before and so I was a bit nervous about what I would produce.

I wanted to do these in pen, but the pen I wanted to use was in my coat pocket which was out of reach, so I had to use what I had to hand, which were a ball pen and a fine felt tip pen.

I struggled to keep up at first, rushing to get the basic form down on paper before the pose ended. However with each pose, I became a little faster and started to think conciously a little less, allowing my hand to almost subconciously move around the paper. In the later poses, I was able to get everything down with time to spare. As there were so many poses, I have only included a few of the best here.

After the short poses, we went back to longer half-hour poses. I was looking forward to these because I had gained a bit of confidence in the short ones. I figured that maybe I would do really well with the extra time I now had.

In actual fact, the pictures I produced (I have included only one here) were no better than before, but the good news was that I produced them in a fraction of the time!
I really enjoyed this week's session, mainly because of the short poses. They forced me to work quickly to capture the figure, something which I had struggled a lot with before. Hopefully this bit of practice will help the gesture drawing I'm attempting.

Talking Sense

Remember my little rant about the quality of today's animated movies? Well someone has outdone me...and then some!

Take a look at this article about it. If you aren't at least nodding in agreement at the end of it, there's something wrong with you. Personally, I was screaming "YES - EXACTLY!!" at the computer screen, along with my girlfriend.

Well done Dave White!!

What a Nice Gesture!

Unfortunately, I missed the figure drawing session last week due to working late, so I haven't had much to post on here! On the bright side, I have decided to learn a few more drawing skills.

Quite some time ago I found a site called Animation Meat. It has quite a few good reference items such as model sheets and general animation info, but where it excels is its 'notes' section, where there are various handouts from different animation courses run by famous animators. In particular, there are handouts by Walt Stanchfield on the subject of gesture drawing for animation. If you follow the link, you will also find another link (on the left) to Leo Brodie's site where he has kindly compiled most of the handouts into a book for anyone to download. I even went to the trouble of getting it printed off (for free, thanks to my friend Craig - thanks mate!) and bound (unfortunately not for free) as there just aren't any books on the subject and it's handy to have it in one's bookshelf as a reference.
I downloaded the 'book' ages ago but never really looked at it until a few days ago. I soon realised that I had been missing quite a large tool in my animation utility belt! So far, I have been concentrating on drawing in detail, trying to get things to look the same on paper as they do in reality. I haven't really considered the emotion in what I'm drawing...and that's where gesture drawing comes into play. I won't go into too much detail, as you can read about it yourself in the book or the handouts, but to sum it up, it's all about drawing quickly to capture the moment and not worrying about proportion or even construction too much. The image above is an example of the type of drawing and is taken from one of the handouts. It was drawn by Ron Husband (another Disney animator).

Well after reading the first three chapters of the book, I decided to have a go. I didn't get round to having a go until today at work, and as I work in an office building, there aren't really many exciting poses to draw! Nevertheless, I made a couple of attempts. The first was a man simply standing in a strange position.
The second was a woman standing thoughtfully, looking a little confused as she tried to work out the solution to a problem with her co-worker.
Of course, they aren't quite as impressive as Ron's but then they are my first attempt! Maybe I'll get better if I choose somewhere a bit more lively to draw!

A Shameless Advert!

I would just like to draw (no pun intended) your attention to my Flickr site, filled with pictures. However for these, I have replaced my pencil for a camera. Enjoy!

UnderstHANDing

Tomorrow is figure drawing day and I thought I'd limber up a little in preparation. As you know, I have been practicing hands a LOT recently. Well when you're at work, there aren't many other body parts you can practice! Here is the only sketch I had time for at the office today.
I was quite pleased with this as there weren't any bad drawings before it. This evening I have been sitting at the drawing board, practicing using my hand model more. So far it seems to be performing pretty well.
Lastly, I decided to push the model as far as I could using my own hand. I twisted it around into a most uncomfortable position and scribbled away, resulting in this next drawing.
After massaging my dead hand back to life, I took the time to reflect on all the hand drawings I have done to date. I do believe I'm seeing progress in my work, and beginning to absorb the lessons I have been trying to learn. I have come to realise that there is a difference between understanding the principle of construction and really being able to adopt it. The concept is not a difficult one to comprehend at all - it is pretty much common sense. However getting to a point where you subconciously "see" the shapes in what you draw takes a little longer. As a celebration of my new understanding of hands, I have made a collage of my favourite drawings.

A Handy Guide

I was drawing a hand last night, trying to improve my skills, producing this picture:
It struck me that each time I drew a hand, I was looking to see what basic shapes it was built from. I decided to try to come up with a standard formula for creating a generic hand, with the aim of speeding up my drawing. The result was this:
I figured that just using this every time, but changing the proportions, would make much more sense. At work I decided to try this out, sketching on a litle note pad next to my big pile of boring work. Overall I was quite pleased with the results, with a higher success rate of creating a decent drawing. I have included all the drawings here - the good and the bad.











Those were the good, here are the not so good:

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

Well another week has passed, and another life drawing session has been completed. This time, the emphasis was on short poses, and here are the results.
I'm claiming this first one to be a warm-up drawing to make an excuse for its crapness! The only part of it that I'm actually happy with is the hand. I normally have so much trouble with hands that it was nice to have one turn out ok for a change. These first three drawings were from 20 minute poses. I felt that my next drawing was a bit better.
I decided to try using pencil instead of charcoal, just to see if there was any difference in the work that I produced. However for the remaining drawings I have reverted to charcoal.
It's fairly obvious from this that I'm not too good at heads either yet! I thought about practicing just the head but decided that I could study heads anytime, and I had better use this time for drawing the rest of the body. I'm trying to pay close attention to what I'm drawing so that all the little anatomical subtleties sink in. Whilst making this drawing, I realised that in this position, the base of the neck sinks slightly into the area between the collarbone and the shoulder blades - something I hadn't really paid attention to before.
This rear-view was from a 10 minute pose. I found that the reduced time helped me to loosten up a little, producing a picture that seems to have a more lifelike feel to it. However, the person in my version could be either a man or a woman and thus is not quite right!
Another 10 minute drawing, this one started out really well. I drew a minimal amount of lines and I was really pleased with what I had, but I made the mistake of not stopping and so I feel that, while there is not a lot of detail present, it is overworked.
After having been quite pleased with the outcome of the 10 minute sketches, I was quite looking forward to doing even shorter ones. This one was 5 minutes. Unfortunately it didn't really turn out as well as I had hoped.
Last of all, the model did a long 40 minute pose, from which I drew this. I was getting pretty tired by this point after not having eaten all day, and I think my fatigue shows! Having said that, I was quite pleased with the face for once. I guess there's always a bright side!

Lost in Spaces

I did it! I finally got to a life drawing session!

After spending an uncomfortably long time walking the dark back alleys of Manchester with my girlfriend, we finally found the studio, which was even more unnerving. We climbed two incredibly steep flights of stairs that felt like they would collapse at any moment and made our way through a labyrinth of rooms called artists' "spaces" until we finally got to a small room crammed with artists, who were in turn crammed in utter silence around a naked man in a chair.

Well after the initial discomfort of the situation, we began to draw. Tonight's session was "long poses" in which the model stayed still for about an hour at a time, meaning there was only enough time for two poses. We joined the group a bit late and so had to rush the first one a bit, but here is my attempt.
The man looked to be in his 60s, but my attempt has the head of a 20 year old! I think it actually looks like Corey Feldman! I finished drawing this before the end of the pose so I decided to concentrate on his fascinatingly mishapen foot.
There are two points to know: firstly, it's unfinished, and secondly, it's crap! At the end of the pose, the model put on a gown and darted over to me, saying "I just had to come over to you as you aren't afraid to tackle feet...that's unusual." Whether he was actually impressed in any way with what he saw, I didn't find out. With the level of skill of the other artists around me, I would guess not.

After a short break, the organiser of the session spent some time placing the model in a new pose, and then we began drawing again.
I was more pleased with this attempt. I felt that I captured the pose better even though I was drawing from an awkward view point. Spurred on by the model's comment about feet, I decided to try another foot on its own again too:
I know it looks a bit deformed, but that's what his foot was actually like! Again, after the pose finished, he came over to see what we had produced. This time he expressed his actual opinion...well sort of. He said "well look at that," and, "good for you!" Make of this what you will!

I'll be interested, of course, to see whether I improve at future sessions.