2 posts tagged “animation”
After a week of stressing out and asking any and everyone for advice on my film, finally having a short but productive meeting with my thesis adviser helped a lot in getting me back on track. It's easy to loose perspective when you are working on just one thing, you keep looking at the same thing and it's good to just sit down with someone and throw some ideas back and forth. Of course being me, I went overboard in seeking a different point of view, I found myself all to eager to take every single critique I was given to heart and set out to make changes to work with those critiques. What became the third edit of my pre-vis was just that, a cut that aim to please everyone, thus an edit that was nothing but compromises.
After snapping back to my senses I got back to trying to make what I set out to make at the very start, it took a bit of time to get back on track, but since then I've made quite a bit of progress and I think I'm actually happy enough with the edit now that I'm ready to lock the cut. Fingers crossed.
In some ways, I found it rather odd that I've worked as an animator, called myself an animator but never really actually understood how to animate. First off I've never actually studied, learn or researched animation techniques, whether it was Flash, AfterEffects or Maya. I stuck to what I've figured out in Flash and did everything solely fixed key frame based. In terms of motion graphics, that technique carried over well. Since at the time I started as an AFX animator the "Flash Look" was in, the blunt, abrupt, cutty style worked and generally for most title and type work that still holds true.
The challenge came when I started working with virtual cameras where I actually have to create smooth animation that doesn't look like someone just kicked the camera half way through a push. So moving away from keyframes, I've been really trying to get a hang of animating with curves. It's different and difficult to visualize as how a curve on a graph relates to speed and movement in space. Practice, practice, practice...
