In week 5, we learned about the fundamentals of weight shift. The key principles here are anticipation and overlapping actions, and through starting off with blocking techniques, we established key poses and timing.
One notable thing I learned from this session is the importance of balance/ symmetry, in the introductory presentation there was a part which revealed how characters could be split in the middle and show a balance on either side of the split. This struck me as something both benign and highly influential to the way a character is displayed in any medium, both invisible and so visible. I love aspects of art and design like this, things that most people wouldn’t even notice yet plays such a massive role in what makes a good artwork.
As you can see, the ball makes a small preparatory movement downwards in anticipation of the step. As it rises again in order to move its leg out for the movement the rest of the body catches up, creating a feeling of lag which fits with the overlapping action principle.
- Neutral standing pose.
- Prep pose with the ball squashed and tilted.
- Step pose with one leg extended forward and the ball leaning over it.
- Follow-through pose where the back leg pushes off the ground.
Upon analysis of my blocking, I can see that I’m not utilising the rig to its fullest potential, and also made a few errors in this animation. For one, you can see a foot is not staying at the same spot on the Y axis, I want to implement foot rolls to add bounce and life to the animation in the next iteration. Integrating foot drag would also add to the overlapping action.
Another aspect to this class was making realistic poses using principles touched on in our previous session, I opted for a character sitting on a bench with their elbow raised over the backrest. I chose this pose because I want to get better at creating relaxed, life-like animated characters.
Here is the feedback from our animation tutor, emphasizing the importance of flow. I notice how the annotated pose is a lot more wavy, creating a line that starts from the head, flows through the torso and continues down to the legs. The upper body also shows a more dynamic tilt, by having the torso back and the head leaning a little forward. This seemingly creates more tension and interest in the pose. The arms are also a lot more exaggerated, with waves instead of straight lines – I notice this feature is lacking in my life drawing too actually. I tend to make my human figures seem like mannequins which is something I’ve been trying to work on through frequent practice. The legs are also more dynamic here too, with a stronger tilt and rotation in the lower leg and ankle.
I initially thought my posing showed signs of relaxed ease but it only shows how much there is for me to learn.
I want to experiment more with more exaggerated movement, we covered how you cant portray a character’s personality through the way that they move and the idea of exploring that further is exciting.