Category: Classes

In one of the Monday classes, I got a chance to try creating a stop motion animation with an armature. The exercise that we did that day was the lift, push, and pull exercise. To familiarise us with the process, we were asked to create a simple animation of the character reacting and waving. After I finished with the waving animation, I continued with the lift animation. It was quite hard to do in the beginning especially because I kept bumping into the desk and ruined the scene. So apparently your awareness of your body and your space is something important in stop motion, which was an interesting notion to grasp on that day.

Another thing that I got of from this experience was that in doing stop motion, it is better to have a clear vision of what the frame-by-frame would look like because it would be hard to create new in-betweens after you have shot many frames. Overall, I would say that I enjoyed doing the stop motion exercise because I got to learn new things and it felt like some sort of dance between me and the puppet. Which was a bit of a weird analogy that I could think of when looking back to that day. But yeah!

The first animation exercise that we did in this course was the bouncing ball. I remember how frustrated I was on my first day working on this exercise and it got me quite a long time to grasp the basic understanding of the exercise. In my very first bouncing ball animation, I had no clue how to do spacing and timing, so the animation felt too even and too stiff. I remember that I spent my weekend watching many bouncing ball videos so I could get a better understanding of how to approach the exercise.

This exercise was then followed by the follow-through exercise, which I could say was quite the moment when I kind of finally “get it”(kind of). I would not say that this eureka moment propelled me in a way that makes working on these exercises easy. But it does simplify my thought process when we were expected to create the bouncing characters.

The next exercise was the Lift, Push, and Pull exercise. I did this exercise in three different media, which are stop motion, paper, and digital, so I could get an experience in working with each media. On my first day of this exercise, I got to do it in stop motion. The first thing that we all did before starting the exercise was to shoot a video reference. After I got the reference, I tried to sketch some frames which would help me pose the armature.

For the week after, I got to do the exercise on paper. For this one, I used both the video footage and my stop motion animation as a reference. Later, I worked on the push exercise digitally.

Personally, I didn’t find one media to be better or easier than the other. I think I enjoyed trying all of them. Although I did miss the undo button when working non-digitally. Regarding the output of my work, I would say that I am not truly satisfied yet with my work on this exercise. I feel like something is missing from my animation, maybe it lacked tension or anticipation or even suspense that you can grasp when you see a character putting their effort into doing these pushing, pulling, or lifting movements. So, it would be something that I will try to work on more.

Doing a proper life drawing class has been something that I’ve looked forward to for a long time. For me, drawing has been something that I’ve been doing intuitively, yet I learned from this class that we can approach life drawing based on its purposes. This reminds me of the classic design principle “form follows function”. For this class, the drawing served as prior communication data that will be used for animation purposes. Some of these data are gesture, flow, volume, etc.

From what I observed from my drawing, I realised that I do have some drawing habits that I need to minimize so I could adapt well to this class. For example, I tend to draw the figure part by part, that in my opinion, interrupted the flow of the gesture. And I also realised that just because the figure that I drew was clear in my eyes (as in the understanding of its volume, direction, pose) it may not be translated well to other people’s eyes, which meant that it doesn’t communicate well.

Week by week I tried to gradually change how I approach life drawing based on the information and materials that were given in the class, such as applying the beans principle, how to create the line of action, how to focus more on the flow of the gesture, etc. And I do see some differences and changes in how I draw. What is challenging for me is, every time I panic (Usually during the 30 seconds), my old habit is back. But this class helped me in these gradual changes, and I am quite optimistic that it will help me improve more and more.