This is an AWESOME project by Shel & Justin Rasch. Their last film was really inspirational, and fun, but this project has me even more excited for all the action and adventure. I especially love the characters and designs for this film. Now, please, go throw fistfuls of your money at them.
Another test for timing & spacing in stopmo. This one is a lot better than the other first two, despite hands and gauges in the frames. This is so much fun, and even more so when it works!
I've been re-reading some of my animation books, principles, and school notes to get my animation skills back in shape, and I've noticed that all of them stress timing & spacing as one of the most important principles. This must be something I forgot because my animation has always been very much about posing. It's amazing to me how far good timing & spacing will get you. I'm going to keep testing in clay and stopmo, and hopefully get some decent animation on an armature soon. Wish me luck.
Finally animated a little claymation test. Lessons learned: 1 Clay is difficult to work with; 2 Make lighter armatures for such small characters; 3 watch for such big hitches in the future; 4 double check for clutter in the frame before you snap the frames This is super fun. I might do another quick test tonight, and start planning a lighter, larger puppet.
I've been trying to get back on the horse of animating lately. I got super lazy after my wedding, honeymoon, and other big life things, so I've scheduled myself 2-3 hrs a night after work to sit down and animate, plus more time on weekends, and I'm working on a new dialogue shot. It worked pretty well months ago when I tried it. This time though, I want to incorporate some drawing as well. Drawing well is pretty important to me and I just don't do it enough in CG animation even though it's one of the 12 founding principals. I'll still be animating mostly in Maya for the foreseeable future, but I believe good drawings are essential for good animation.
EWJ study with some correction notes
I'm studying construction drawing, on the advice of John K, which I've never really practiced seriously. I've done a little out of the Preston Blair book but then I remembered I had this construction sheet of one of my favorite cartoon characters; Earthworm Jim! I'll keep studying out of both the Preston Blair book and other model sheets I can find.
I got these refs from Mike Deitz' blog slappypictures.blogspot.com. He's one of the original animators on the game and there's a ton of original stuff there.
