Andy's Comment

Andy did try and comment on my blog last week but I’d somehow blocked him from doing that, so here is his comment and my response:

Andy: “Fantasia is a flawed film, but I'm glad you've begun to appreciate some of the technical mastery of the animators in that studio. I'd be interested on your thoughts of how you progressed in your understanding of animation in the two tasks you did on Tuesday. Svankmajer is a fascinating animator. If you like the darkness of his films you may also enjoy the Quay Brothers. Some good thoughts in your blog, keep it up.”

Right… the two tasks last week where my fist proper attempt at 2D animation, everything I have done up to this point has been 3D, so I was a bit daunted by it. However, I have had a quick flick through Richard William’s The Animator’s Survival Kit so I had a rough idea of what I was doing. In the first task, with the heavy character, I put a lot of work into the anticipation of the jump and was reasonably happy with the result, although I did loose the proportions of the figure a bit. The jump was not very good as it just seemed that the character was gliding through the air and the fall was too slow. I was able to correct the fall by editing out some of the drawings. With the landing I had similar problems as I did with the anticipation; where the figure became too distorted.

For the second task I tried to correct the problems with the jump by adjusting the arc and using fewer drawings, this did improve things but I still don’t feel that there right and I messed up the vibrations in the board; instead of moving with the character during the anticipation it just started vibrating when they jumped.

This week I had the advantage of having seen Fantasia and have tried to use much more subtle ‘stretch and squash’. It’s hard to gauge at this point how effectively I have done this as the animation is still a work in progress; but there are some bits that I am quite happy with as well as other bits that I am not too pleased with and I am begging to get the feeling that I might have been a bit over ambitious with this task. If I can I will try and scan some frames from it tomorrow.

I did some research on the Quay brothers last year, I have not had a chance to look at any of their work this week but I remember liking a lot of their work and being impressed by the their lighting techniques, especially in Nocturna Articificialia (1979), couldn’t find this on the internet but there are some interesting interviews. I will hopefully get a chance to pop into the library at some point to see if I can find some of their films.