Happy Birthday to Me!

I can imagine no better way to celebrate my 23rd year than to finally start my blog! Now that I'm in grad school working towards me MFA in Animation, time is a precious commodity, so spending time here sharing my work and my thoughts is the gift I'm giving myself.

And what better way to start an Animation blog than by sharing my most recent animations from my "Principles and Pipelines" class? Last week, we animated a flour sack jumping onto and off of a box. The flour sack is an elementary animation exercise to work on capturing weight and effort (without the pesky details like limbs, a head, or facial features). Here's my first stab at it:



I know it's very dark... but other than that I was pretty happy with it. My instructor recommended more squash on the second landing, and to add some personality to my flour sack. My buddy Bunker suggested adding some weight on the first jump.

So here's a new one with my revisions (and additions):



I feel the sense of weight is a little better now, and I added him mopping his brow after the effort of jumping to add some personality. I felt it was still a little bland, so I tried to add a Looney Tunes-style zip-out, which was a fun challenge!

In retrospect, I spent way too much time making every line perfectly dark and pronounced, and I feel like that distraction resulted in motions just a hint too stiff. I'm going to work on drawing more loosely from now on, which should help me be faster, too--then I'll have more time here on the blog! So now I'm off to have brunch and get some other work done, thanks for checking out my stuff, feel free to comment!