Of the types of animation that I have been exposed to so far, my best area is 2D animation, and the type of animation that the year 2 student I worked with in the simulation work experience did was 2D animation. One of the characters in her animation was a frog, which was the servant of a witch. The task given to me by the year 2 student was to draw the frog walking and running. And it needed to be done from three different angles, front, side and back, for a total of six clips.
I think this task links very well to my unit1 courses where we needed to complete the mood change walk as well as the quadruped walk. These courses made me feel more confident about completing the tasks given to me by my Year 2 student.
After completing the mood change walk course, it made me pay more attention to the emotions expressed by the characters when they complete their actions. Different emotions are expressed differently by the characters’ bodies, and different characters express their actions in very different ways. This frog is set up to be naive and cute, so he may sway his body more dramatically when he walks and runs.
The character frog in this assignment has a round, fleshy body, which is very different from the more bony and slender characters I was used to drawing before. Tightly muscled characters don’t have very noticeable muscle deformations during movement, so there is less to think about during the animation process. However, for the frog character, in order to fit the character’s personality setting, it would sway its head up and down or side to side during running and walking, and at the same time, its tummy and buttocks would bounce and deform according to the direction of the movement.
These deformations make the character’s movements more vivid but at the same time increase the difficulty of drawing. Although I have a good understanding of the theory of animation, I was not able to convey the feeling that I wanted to express in the actual operation. I only showed the head bobbing up and down, but ignored the body deformation. Even in the frontal walk, the character’s eyes bobbed up and down with the head, but the mistake was very obvious. So instead of drawing the eyes in the later clips, I focused on the movement of the character’s body.
Based on my animation project in Unit 1 and the simulated work experience with the Year 2 student, I have learnt that completing the basic movement of a character is only the most basic step, there are still a lot of knowledge and skills I need to master, which requires more observation and more practice in my life. (465 words)
