stickman walk

along side the group animation I had to make a single "walk" animation of my stickman. for this I did some research about different walk cycle and choose a right light setting for my animation.

out of the walk cycle I found I chose to do a realistic walk, the reason I chose a real walk cycle for because I wanted to test my ability to make the stickman believable and this walk would be easier to take consistent picture as the stickman legs would be close to the floor then if it was exaggerating.

even though the animation was very short I enjoyed making the stickman walk as I have done some thing like this before, I had a simple concept in my head to make the stickman walk from one side of the camera to the other go give a movement feel without having to move the camera. while I was moving the stickman I had some problems moving the hips leading to the hips to brake off the top half of the stickman. as I was half way through capturing the animation I used some blue tack to stick it together again and finished off the animation.

from this I animation I have learnt that some model that I may use can be very stiff and should be handle with care and I should add more frames to give a more smoother final project.

group project "YMCA"

for this projected we had to work in a group to create a stop motion animation using a build it yourself stickman.

First off we planned out what we'd make for are group animation, at first we thought of making a simple animation where the stickmen would play a game of football using a paper football but after a while we felt that we should test are skills of animation by making a short dance video. for are short dance animation we used a simple song that we could used repeating ceqins and easy dances moves to copy from.

 storyboard drawn by sally:

For the short dance animation we wanted to use the skill we were taught in 2d animation (like squash and stretch, anticipation and timing) and create a comical animation. The song we used from the animation “YMCA” was a very simple dance motion, the stickmen would stomp in place then after wave there arms from left to right before spelling out the YMCA.

The song and original dance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9OO0S5w2k

Acting out the YMCA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ign0jR5Ed28

In the group we all did little bit of everything in the animation from capturing the animation to changing the light effects, doing this we would all get to find what we better at for later group animations. When filming are animation we wanted a to use different styles of lighting to give a dance atmosphere so we used two spotlights one on both side that we could switch between and two camera that could give use two different shooting scenes one full face on the stickmen and one to the side. This became tricky to do as we didn’t what to catch the spotlights or other camera in the shot.

In all the animation went very well we were able to pull off most of the dance move without to much problems. There were only a couple of problem later on in filming the animation as 2 of the stickmen were very stiff to move and eventually broke but we were about to change it in the editing by making the stickmen sit in the background. In all the animation was a little difficult then was hoped for but it showed that anything can happen and you should always have a back up if needed.