Animation

Happy Friday everyone, you made it! Hopefully you’re still excited to read today and learn a few new things before the weekend begins.

One of my favorite skills I have learned in my major is animation! Animation is a very time consuming, but very rewarding skill. If most of you are like me, you grew up like me watching Disney movies and I always wanted to know how they were made. The animation that I know is 3D animation as opposed to the hand drawn 2D animation.

When animating, your main problem is figuring out what you will be creating. Whether it be an object or a character that moves, you have to model the object to begin anything. Modeling can take the longest amount of time in the animation process, but once your piece is modeled, you can do whatever you want to it (moving, talking, etc.)

Some of the obstacles to overcome with animation are making your objects realistic and believeable. For example, you don’t want to create a dog that doesn’t look like a dog or doesn’t move like a dog because then your audience will be confused and your story may not make sense.

A way to avoid and overcome obstacles in the animation process is by pre production. With preproduction, you can create sketches of what you want the outcome of our animation to be and storyboard the sequences so you have your ideas on paper rather than just going from your imagination as you do it. A plus to pre production sketches is that you can constantly update what your objects look like before the final one is done.

The solution to this problem is simple. When we made our final short films for animation, we created a list of settings and characters involved and sketched them out before modeling them. Updates were obviously made, but with the pre production sketch, I had to do much less editing. We then modeled the scenes and characters and were able to animate the film. The animating part is the easiest part, you just make each movement and save it and then playback the video. That’s just a short version of it, but explaining the software is more difficult to understand. In short, the best way to animate is to take your time modeling the objects and focusing on the outcome of them during pre production. The more detail that goes into modeling, the better the final animation will be.

I encourage you all to just start doodling on a piece of paper, it can be a character or an object and draw it 3 different ways. Then find a way to combine all three and work with it so you have a rough sketch of a model. Doing this will help you prepare yourself for the animation process and leave you with items to work with so you don’t have to make things up on the spot.

My challenge for you all today is to watch your favorite Disney animated film and think about a complex scene within that movie, and write me a question in the comment section on how something was made or animated so I can get back to you and further enlighten you on the animation techniques.

That is the cup o’ Joe for today, have a great weekend guys and maybe try and do some of the skills and techniques I’ve talked about this week for yourself so you can better yourself!

 

-Joe

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