We went to the archie building today to look for the giant lightbox there. It reminded me of
PageMaster with all the old scrolls of blueprints that and old books and boxes we had to move off of it. I drew more from The Animator's Survival Kit, and with its magical powers, here is the walk test i did with some cleanup and editing.
Here are some others:
Both of these animations use the same drawings but with different timings. The first one uses a sort of S curve with a quick bang, but a slower recoil. The second animation is evenly spaced at about 7/100 sec each on Fireworks.
3 comments:
damn, you and andy are doing really well with this.
walk:
the guy does have a limp, like you were saying yesterday, but the walk itself looks perfect--there don't seem to be any skips. also, i like how the head bobs throughout.
bang:
how many frames are in that? that looks ridiculously fast. i think the bang of the second one (evenly paced at 7/100) is more fluid than the first version. both look great, though.
jump:
the jump to the right side may need 1 or 2 more frames 'cause it looks too quick...like it skips for half a second or something. and, in the frame after the guy lands on the floor, his eyes should only be half open. i think. do you see it? it's like his eyes are all the way closed when touching the ground and then wide open the next second.
how do they all look if you were to slow them down? i mean, would getting a slow motion effect require tons more frames? probably.
keep it up, man, all animations look great.
Ok, this is perfect because i miss lots of things in my rush to get these things scanned and animated.
walk:
I used half the frames necessary to animate a walk with the least effort. I used 5 frames per walk (that's 4 frames, as one overlaps to the next step), when the least frames needed is 9 (8 frames + 1 that leads into the next step).
Frame 1 - step right
Frame 3 - step off, leading forward
Frame 5 - middle position, foot is straight
Frame 7 - left foot is caught (walking = falling)
Frame 9 - next left
* every missing $ is an in-between
So, in the Animator's Survival Kit, it says:
4 frame = fast run
6 = run, or fast walk
8 = slow run, or cartoon walk (minimalist walk)
12 = brisk, business-like walk, or natural walk
16 frames = strolling walk
20 = elderly or tired walk
24 = slow walk or creep
Oh, do you see how the head gets smaller and bigger as if he's swaying left and right as he's walking (totally unintended).
Bang:
One motion is usually half the cycle. In walking, It's only one step, either left or right, not both. So one bang is just from the point of rest to the second point of rest at the door. That's just 3 frames. The loop has 4 frames. rest, accelerating towards door, rest at door, accelerating away from door.
*I also see some weird behavior with animated gifs on different browsers/computers, and those being different from my Fireworks file... And with all these animations, I'm going to have to put links instead of throwing everything on my page. It's getting tough to load. Esp. on NJIT computers.
jump:
I had a really hard time with this. Visualizing the perspective changes as he moves in air was blowing my mind at the time. If you remember, I tried to copy this first and at the archie building, then anded up doing the walk. While drawing the walk, however, I started seeing the perspective shifts in the figure as he moved. This really helped. Yesterday I was drawing figures from Andy's anatomy book and right away I started drawing in different poses. The book says the walk is one of the hardest things to do, so you learn a lot from it.
I think I'll do the jump over later, cuz in the book it's like 30 or so pages away. I'll try to adjust it with the eyes and more frames, but it will still look very off.
About slowing down, I'm trying to follow the 24 frames/sec rule. And yea, a slow motion walk would be around 16-32 frames per second (32 would be overkill).
Interesting:
The book says the Disney guys did all sorts of experiments to find the perfect walk. Besides stalking people as they walked down the street (which they teach you do to do as an animator), they traced live action (rotoscoped) walks too and it didn't work. It didn't look believable until they added slight exaggerations in the head moving up and down, the arms swings, and especially how high the leg lifts and how it swings (remember goofy's walks?). I thought that was interesting. Something about Iron Giant looks more believable than A Scanner Darkly...
damn, 24 frames/sec? i guess i'm going to need to do that for some scenes if i want to realistically pull off slow motion.
on realism:
yeah, i was thinking the same thing regarding the exaggeration of gestures to convey realism. on my drive home from work several days ago, i was thinking of the exact word to describe realistic acting: kinetic, emotive, exaggerated, spirited...and some others, but i finally settled (with a chuckle and a laugh) on "flamboyant."
and then i imagined actors from the silent era--maybe we should watch some silent films--'cause they had to exaggerate their (e)motions to convey their views through just body language.
Post a Comment