Reading Week Animating

This week was largely studio based, with most of the cat movement and around 4 seconds of ‘Doll’ movement to cover. Mondays session was incredible, in terms of work covered – with around 3 seconds of cat movement animated (Cat runs, hits box and box tips over). The work method was very much pose to pose for the cat run up to the box, although at this point I deviated largely from the storyboard made in pre-production and chose to work Straight ahead. The previous plan was that the cat would hit the box, paw at and drag the doll into it and proceed to drag it out, I decided that actually the Cat would knock the box onto its side, which would propel the doll from the box and the Cat would climb out of the box and look at the camera. This decision was largely chosen as it might not be possible to do all of the actions of my original idea in the time frame available.

Of course, having the cat climb out of the box was an important step, so I set aside 3 hours on Tuesday to make sure that I got that action perfect. Unfortunately, this proved to be difficult and issues with not getting the correct scale or motion meant that while I had a better understanding of how to move forward, my animation did not physically progress at all. Still with the ruins of the animation Tuesday, it gave me a solid basis for Wednesday’s animating.

Photoshop had unforeseen issues on Wednesday, which caused the work which was done Tuesday to corrupt. This wasn’t a huge setback as I had been saving work on a regular basis in case of such issue. Still after discussions with the media lab technicians about the problem seeming to have a no solution to the problems that I have been having, I decided to be much more vigilant when saving – making sure I could open and close an extra save file before closing the stage I was at.

Despite not having the framework build on Tuesday to work with, I managed to get the Cat out of the box, sitting down and looking at the camera. Again the movements of the cat as it squeezed out of the box was very difficult to animate – at points the cat seeming to just move on the spot with far too many steps in a short period of time. To rectify this, I moved the box back slightly to reveal the legs. This worked well as when asked, everyone felt that the animation was smooth.

Thursday was the final day I spent working on the Cat animation. I focused on animating the doll, which was done on a separate video layer. The first time I attempted to animate the doll flying from the box, the speed was far too high – meaning that the end result was a bad example of secondary action. Before I could alter it after lunch, the file had corrupted. Again, like with the Cat moving out from the box, the second attempt was much better as I captured the arc and timing well. The doll then landed in a bowl and follows the various panning of the ‘camera’.

This was the end result.

All that needs to be done to finish this project, is placement of audio in the animation – which I will try to get done some time over the weekend or early next week.