Week 1
In this Module, we'll be learning all about the importance of Performance and Character.
For the first lecture, we learned about something called the "action line" (which I've always known as the "S curve"), which is a foundational line that runs across a character's whole body to serve as a basis for when you draw the character's final body later on:
After we leaned this, we then had to then draw a bunch of different poses really really quickly to demonstrate how quickly poses can be drawn with this in mind.
I actually found this lecture to be quite insightful, as before then I wouldn't really draw my characters with any sort of S-curve. As a result, sometimes certain characters would end up in eerily similar poses. (and in the case of Lorange and Bitris 16, they would end up with basically the exact same mouth)
With this in mind, I think this action line has the potential to help me create more dynamic character poses in the future.
A few days later, we would then go on to use photoshop in order to animate a bird taking off with the help of reference footage and the action line to make sure the posing is more dynamic:
Animating this was quite quick for me since I decided to take a very rough approach to the animation (as in I just threw any and all quality control out of the window) in order to get this done faster since next week we'll be animating a tennis player doing a serve.
Overall, this task was fairly easy for me to do since the emphasis wasn't on the detail but rather the movement itself (meaning I could throw all quality control out of the window as long as the drawings looked vaguely like a bird), I think that the action line might also help me keep a level of consistency and even give Super Sheep and other characters large hands in 2D.
Week 2
For this week's lecture, we talked about the importance of making the movements of your animated characters believable in order to better connect with the audience. Afterwards we had to draw one another in groups (one person did a pose and the others would draw the pose and then we'd swap out), this was a funny exercise to do because of the poses we would do (I did the classic Sonic finger wagging pose because I'm a Sonic fan).
After a few days, we would go on to animate a tennis player doing a overhead serve with more reference footage and use of the action line to make it more dynamic:
While I did enjoy doing this, I think that somewhere along the way I may have screwed things up, as after I decided to go ahead and animate the ball on a separate layer once it leaves the player's hand things got a bit more complicated. It also didn't help that I was also a little bit distracted near the end discussing stuff with friends and even the tutor.
Oh By The Way, This
looks like Wix is implementing a 500 megabyte limit going forward for free users such as myself (because penny pinching is hilarious apparently), with this in mind, I think the most logical choice for me to take is to go ahead and find an open-source alternative to wix I can use to make a whole new website while still leaving this one up for archival reasons so that I can keep my half-formal, half-informal style going for as long as possible.
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