Project Summary

My goal was to learn animation. What I’ve learned is that there are many intricate, smaller things that must be learned and all of those things combined together with a lot of work put in leads to what one might call animation. To animate you must be able to draw characters, rig characters with a puppetry system, keyframe movements and add anticipation and bounce to create an illusion of life in the character, the several types of mouths that must be drawn and available to be assigned to any frame needed, and finally a walking cycle that gives our character proper weight and stepping power. Now that I’ve learned these things I still must learn the effectiveness of virtual cameras with different focal lengths and how to change and create shots within 2-D environments. Animating is a growing field in America as well as internationally and now is a good time to familiarize myself with the process.

I have spent a minimal time in character development/creation strictly due to time parameters and it is something I’d like to explore once this assignment is over. I successfully know how to rig and operate a character to move in a way that looks good. I also could not spend extensive time studying the physics of walking cycles or my movement might look a little more natural. I do not own any 3rd party leg rigging software like Rubberhose so I had to do it frame-by-frame with keyframes. I am happy with the progress I made during this time and I think I laid the groundwork for what might be a hobby of mine for years to come.

Animating is a ridiculous amount of work. To acquire the skill I imagined I would have by the end of this project would actually take me hundreds of hours of practice and gaining familiarity within the program to create something truly great. It is much like a muscle and you have to work out that part of your brain often enough that it becomes second nature. If you take time off and ignore it, your ability and patience for animating will suffer. Learning animation is not immediately rewarding or satisfying as it takes several hours to create something that lasts a few seconds so one must be willing to invest 10+ hours into learning the basic and theory before they see any results rendered out. I will continue my research of this topic independently.