It's the end of the first week of a new quarter and it's shaping up to be another really busy one. I'm SO GLAD that I opted to take only three classes as all of them will take up a lot of time. One of them, Basic Techniques of Animation: 3D Media, focuses on traditional 3D animation - stop-motion and non-cel animation. This includes art media such as puppet, clay, pixilation, shadow puppet, sand on glass and paint on glass. We are expected to come up with eight short clips using any of the above media. That's almost one clip per week!
I got to work immediately by first raiding my kids' toy trunk looking for action figures. It's a good idea to start with an already-made puppet before jumping into using a self-made puppet or clay. I needed to find an action figure that had enough movable pieces to allow adequate movements. I found one that I think the boys got from the Lego store. I have no idea what it's suppose to be.
Anyway, here is the clip I ended up with. It's my second version; the first one was a trial version that I used to get a feel of timing, motion and of course problems I needed to deal with - like keeping the figure completely still when one foot is up in the air. Let me just say: double-sided tape is your friend!
Cool! Like the way you made him walk. I was always a big Ray Harryhausen fan back in the day, so I have a soft spot for stop-motion animation.
ReplyDeleteI just watched the skeleton fight scene in "Jason and the Argonauts" on YouTube. It's really good! Nowadays they'll just use motion-capture for such a scene, which is kind of cheating as far as animation techniques are concerned. I'm going to watch more of his stuff.
ReplyDeleteWith stop-motion, I found that I was able to focus on the motion and story-telling and not worry about how well I drew the characters. I really liked it! I still love drawing but this is a really different way of making an animated clip which I'm surprised to find how much I enjoy.