Rope Climb Progress

Speaking of the new capture station, here's something I just shot. The rough keys extremes and breakdowns for the rope climb animation. I really like the method of planning I did for this (the bottom three videos on this post). By doing that straight ahead pass, and the "pendulum pass", I completely figured everything out before doing the real animation. The pendulum pass was especially great. It's like, "Do this animation using only the timing and spacing, while still having it read."

Capture Station 2.0

So, I'm staying at a friend's house. I didn't feel like taking the foam-core construction that is my home capture station so I rigged up a new, more portable one. This time instead of building a box, I just taped my webcam to my tripod.

There's the basic setup. This one both works better, and was easier to make than the last. Now I can adjust the height and have better access to the camera's focus ring.

There's really no instructions...I just taped it to that arm....

I'm almost disappointed I didn't think of this earlier.

Captures about as well as the last one.

What am I doing with my life?

So, I've been doing a lot lately and haven't been posting it here. Silly me!

I started my Independant study in animation a couple weeks ago. Here's the first project. Three weeks of work. I'm somewhat happy with it. I'm a little worried about the readability, but overall I like it. When I went to capture it I had left the actual ball animation at home, so I just did it quickly in Photoshop afterwards.

Oh! And the 2D Studio Tem project is coming along fairly well. We're about half way done with the animation. Here's the progress version.

Now then. I just started on my second animation for the independent study and have decided to document my entire process. Mainly so I can really see the flaws and benefits of it. I've decided to start off a little differently. I'm doing my thumbnails full size on crappy paper so I can really see the relationship of the drawings right off the bat. I just did a straight ahead pass on 2's 3's 4's 8's and 12's really fast to see how I'd tackle it naturally, before thinking about what the Keys, Extremes and Breakdowns are. It was pretty fun, and I kind of like how it came out.

After running it by some professors I edited the first pass. Then I did this quick pendulum pass to really plot out the arc and spacing of the head.

Now to start keying stuff out for real