What's This

I've just submitted my second 11 Second Club entry, even though there are still things not right about it. They are all things that would have taken too long to fix, so I have just left it as is. I spent the last couple of hours trying to fix a motion blur that stayed on the final pose. I guess it's something to do with the fact that the final pose is not moving. I'm not really sure. Anyway, I had to render out the final 50 frames without motion blur to compensate which was annoying.

Well if you want to vote, click here!

Dream, Dream, Dream

I just got home from work, thinking I really need to take a night off animating. I figured I'd just check my emails and check Google Reader for any interesting posts on the blogs that I follow, then just spend the evening slobbing in front of the TV.

However, as is always the case, the animation-related blogs out there have just inspired me and have made me want to animate again! So both thanks and curses to you all out there! I'll make particular not of the blog of Hans Bacher, the author of 'Dream Worlds', a fantastic book that I keep meaning to talk about in detail on here.
My 11 Second Club entry is nearly finished now, but I won't post any more works in progress until I have the final one. I've made a bit of a mess of it in some respects, particularly towards the end. However I don't really have time to make any major fixes on it at the moment. I'm looking forward to a clip with dialogue next month. People say that dealing with a lack of words is a good exercise in pantomime, but I do that every day with Lego characters, so I'm not feeling it myself!

Having Trouble Seeing

I'm up to about 15 hours worth of work with my 11 Second Club entry now. After showing my last version to a few people at work, I was convinced that I needed to make the poses stronger towards the end of the shot as the guy gets more frustrated. I also removed the first pose from the previous version, which has the effect of making things a bit clearer.

I've really tried to avoid moving on to smoothing out the animation curves before I'm happy with how it looks in this stepped form. I currently have at least one keyframe every three frames to define the motion in detail and leave as little work for the computer as possible. Towards the end of the clip, all the animation is on ones as things are moving so quickly and broadly.

I still need to do a fair bit of work on the face and hands before I start to smooth things out. I'm also not quite sure all my poses are working yet. I feel like his frustration suddenly jumps a level towards the end rather than having a gradual climb. It gets difficult at this stage to work out what's wrong with an animation as I have been looking at this thing for a significant period of time now and it's easy to miss obvious things.

Ch...Ch...Ch...Changes

Back to work today, and fully fit again (apart from my incescent tiredness), but I've managed to keep working tonight to get more of my 11 Second Club entry done. Here's the result so far. As you can see, I have changed the camera angle since yesterday, as well as changing the ending.

Sickening

I've been off sick from work for the last couple of days, feeling pretty crappy. Today I was starting to feel a little better and so tried to do some drawing for this month's 11 Second Club (which I said before I wouldn't bother with). I spent ages drawing and couldn't manage one satisfactory pose.

This evening I decided to do it in CG instead, and managed to rattle off this in just a couple of hours (obviously not finished yet). I really am wondering if I'll ever be able to do this in 2D. It seems a world away.

Random Disney

I haven't got a lot to post at the moment, hence the Disney studies. As I said a few posts ago, I'm trying to give myself some time to just enjoy drawing. It seems it's more difficult than you'd think. I'm still kinda half-working on an 11 Second Club entry, which may or may not get finished. I was meaning to just stop doing 2D animation just for a month or so, to give myself chance to just draw, draw, draw. I can't seem to avoid giving it a go though for some reason.

Why Do You Animate?

For a while now I have been giving consideration to what it is that draws animators to animation. I think just about everyone I have ever spoken to about the subject has said they are into animation because they want to tell stories. To do that, they have to learn how to make characters appear to come alive.

I'd like to know if I'm weird.

I like to tell stories just like other people (I actually think that's a general trait of humans), but that is not my reason for learning animation. The kick I get out of it is nothing to do with telling stories. It's not about explaining characters' journeys, or passing on morals. The kick I get out of it is simply bringing life to something that has none.

I revel in the aspect of animation that everyone else seems to see as simply a means of conveying a story. I derive just as much pleasure out of depicting a character getting on with something as mundane as lifting a box as I do with showing him doing something 'theatrical' with some story-based goal in mind.

I do have ideas that I would like to turn into short films, but I think that is just human nature. We all like to tell each other stories, whether just gossip from around the neighbourhood or great fantastical yarns. My desire to tell stories is by no means my reason for becoming an animator. I could have gone into live action film for that, or attempted to be an author.

Am I alone in thinking like this?

Quality Pencil Time

This picture was clearly not something that I intended to post online, however I felt it kinda illustrated how I feel at the moment.

To cut a long story short, I need to get back to enjoying drawing. I've been trying to get started on this month's 11 Second Club, but have been struggling to draw. I seem to constantly be trying to complete some fantastic piece of work and having a thoroughly miserable time doing it. So I'm going to take some time out. I'm going to just draw for the sake of drawing for a while. I want to hold onto the enjoyment of it rather than using it as a means to an end.

Lost For Words

Well I was hoping for something interesting in this month's 11 Second Club audio clip, but I never expected this. There's no dialogue! Just noises. I believe the idea is to give people a go at pantomime acting, which technically is something I should be pretty good at, working on Lego games. Time will tell.

Anyway, after spending a while without a single clue what to do, I came up with two ideas, both similar in nature. One is reasonably straightforward, whereas the other is quite complicated. While I think the latter could be much funnier, I have been advised by several people to do the easier one, so maybe I had better take their advice.

It's a shame as I had designed a character for the second idea.