Another Blender Conference 2015 video. I've been learning a lot watching some of these. They're not all targeted towards animation, but most have useful information. I really liked this one. Early key points for me were that writing a script for a short idea isn't always the best approach. It's not nearly as funny to read something that's visual, like Beorn Leonard said, "Get drawing early!"
The talk is based off of the short film Glass Half made for NPR.
It's a great film. The style is super cartoony, which I really like, and the animation matches pretty well. Again, this has a hand in animation from Hjalti Hjalmarsson. I was also interested in what Sarah Feidlaufer said about how she drew some of the storyboarding like a comic book. With different panels. The short definitely plays like a comic, I didn't notice the first time around.
Something surprising they did was render the short in real-time. That's pretty amazing. It's easy connect the dots of Pixar or Disney movies having fur breakthroughs, or water breakthroughs, or clouds. But for this small team of artists to think like that and have breakthroughs while under contract was really cool.
This is more of a post that interested me rather than being focused on animation. But I still learned about keeping things simple and drawing story ideas early on!
So, I've been watching lots of YouTube videos and tutorials and stuff on animation. I've come across an excellent talk by Hjalti Hjalmarsson, a wonderful animator, rigger, and more who works on Blender open projects.
It's super informative and made me rethink posing for camera or natural posing from all angles. Especially how resizing legs, like in the video, can really benefit you. But it could make the rig look off or weird in general. Also, Hjalti must be an incredibly patient man... How on earth can you work with constraints like that?! I definitely need to do more studying with constraints.
It's pretty awesome how Hjalti shoots reference. Using lots of people doing the same task to find general ideas as well as personality. And something to remember always remember the fulcrum point. Center of mass can help animation look more natural instead of the floaty, newbie look. I really need to remember this. I love how he shoots detailed reference. I have an iPhone for a reason! :)
Another key thing that caught my attention is anticipation. Without anticipation, animation could just move from one place to another. There's no life at all in that, and it looks really, really bad.
Talking about life... make things human. It could be little accidents that happen during reference that catch attention, maybe something you see from a random dude outside. I love how Hjalti points out he liked how the voice actor almost thought that cigarette was already lit before he grabbed his matches, then checked his time. That really stuck out to me, character is everything. I mean, this is character animation after all! :)
His point nearing the end was great, even in Disney's Tangled there is a small error that nobody noticed, but it functioned. The shot wasn't completely perfect frame by frame, but it looked okay in camera. However I'm not going to fall into, "Well, hey, Disney doesn't make everything perfect!" :)
Something I'm going to try to do is study some animation, I downloaded some trailers from YouTube, and I want to start looking into how the animator behind that scene got it to look so lifelike.
