Week 10 - 12 beat to music

The theme for this week is syncing to a musical beat, specifically a 12 frame beat.  The walk must be a cycle where the contact falls on the beat.  It must be repeated with music behind it that also has a 12 frame beat.  Mark Mayerson wrote an excellent post about using a metronome to time animation.  The post will give you all the basics to figure out this weeks walk.  If you want to learn even more about it Amir Avni wrote two posts about studying cartoons for musical timing.

Week 9 - Sexy Walk

Here is my attempt at the sexy walk.  Making things move slowly and smoothly is difficult.  I spent a lot of time cleaning this up yet it still looks off.

Week 9 - Sexy Walk

I have been away for a couple weeks, hence the lack of posts.  Now, I'm back and ready to animate.  This week's theme is a sexy walk.  For me, that would be a sultry, feminine walk; but you can animate whatever type of walk you think is sexy.  Happy Animating.

Week 8 - Ugly Anatomy

This was a useful study but the final animation turned out really ugly.  Building from the skeleton up is a strange way to draw, much less animate.  It ended up with a flat, lifeless result.  The most important take away I got from this is that trying to make things look to realistic makes them look dead.  Were I to do this again, I would start with the fleshed out human and worked down to the skeleton from there, but I'm sure that would have its share of problems as well.  If I look at it as an academic exercise to study in-depth how humans move instead of as a work of are (or even a decent looking animation) than it is a success.

Week 8 - Anatomy Animation

Since this is the final weekly walk of the semester, I have decided to make this, by far, the most challenging theme yet.  This weeks theme is to be handled realistically (gasp).  The object is to animate a human walking.  The challenge is to include the anatomy.  First a pass of the simplified skeleton walking.  Then add simplified muscles.  Then a final pass with skin.  Getting every little detail of anatomy is not necessary, and would probably be distracting, however there should be enough detail to clearly tell what it is.  Below is an example of what I mean applied to a fantasy beast.  Break out the Muybridge book and Anatomy book.  Its time to study.

Week 7 - Where da hose at?

This one was a lot of fun.  I love animating in the 30s style.
-John Guy

Week 7 - Rubber Hose

The theme for this weeks weekly walk is rubber hose style.  This is a cartoon style from the late 1920's early 1930's where the characters limbs have no joints.  They bend a wiggle as if they are made of rubber.  Hence the name, rubber hose.  Happy Animating!