250 Word Reflection

The advanced animation skills workshop was very challenging for me. I really struggled to animate a convincing walk cycle and it took me the entire length of the workshop to create a cycle I'm relatively happy with. With every cycle (walk and run), I got a click but by re-ordering the drawings I managed to smooth that out.

The weight exercises felt easy after the walk cycles although they too were a challenge. Trying to create the illusion of weight and get a good sense of pace to enhance the struggle was tough. By holding certain images within the animation and changing the length of time the others stayed on the screen, I was able to create a sense of struggle although I feel that with more time theses could be vastly improved. I know that my animation timing is an issues but if I continue doing exercises like this then maybe I can stop relying so much on my editing software to smooth out the pace and instead be able to just shoot my animation outright without the need for post-production.

The obstacle course also shows my lack of timing. Some elements work better than others - the monkey bars work well whereas the rope crawl has a lack of anticipation as he slides down the pole without caution; he is crawling above spikes and so the lack of caution detracts from the danger. It also seems like the course is 3 separate obstacles rather than 1 fluid obstacle. If I had drawn all the backgrounds on one sheet of paper I could have tracked my character and by drawing my character running from course to course, I could have made it look like a more polished and complete course.

The push and pulls are my favourite outcomes from this workshop and are the things I am most proud of. I am also very proud at myself for being able to overcome the issues I faced with my walk cycle. Going through my various attempts you can see how I was able to overcomes the problems I had. I never thought I would be able to create a functional cycle and now that I have I feel like I've overcome my biggest challenge in the course so far. I would love to be able to do more exercises like this so that I can iron out the obvious flaws. Only by practicing will I be able to improve my animation skills.