Animation 102:Week 5: 2/3/18: Walking in stopmotion:

Upon finishing todays session of Animation 102 I went to the stop mo suite to do the walking exercise using the stopmotion armature. I set up the stop motion space and placed the armature into a relaxed pose before executing the walk. Learning from last week I was using the reference footage to record some of the key frames in the stopmotion exercise. Upon creating the 25fps hold for the animation I decided to try using one of the frame methods used in the survival kit using 16 frames for the walk in the capture settings. It sounded to me like a very good plan, however as I did more shots of the armature walking I played the piece back and that's when I made a mistake. The animation was incredibly slow and seeing it made me feel like I made a slight mishap in my judgement.

This meant I had to start the animation again, but I set the capture settings to two frames this time so that I would have a smoother but moderate paced walk. When the animation reached its halfway point I began to see the walk wasn't looking realistic enough and following the reference video proved exceedingly difficult possibly due to my lack of concentration or exhaustion. When finished I was feeling unsatisfied with the animation and decided to try again, I was very frustrated. This time I did things differently, using a spare piece of paper I sketched out all the poses in the walk as a small substitute bar sheet, so to speak from the reference footage.

This helped me to realise the importance of mapping out the movements on the bar sheets before starting an animation. From this I executed the animation again, however there was still an issue in regards the positioning of the arms when the armature is walking and even looking back at the reference footage wasn't helping. The animation was soon finished and was a significant improvement on the first, the two animations were then saved and converted on my pen drive.


Looking back on this experience I felt like I could've done more, such as save time for doing a bar sheet for the animation so that it wouldn't be as difficult when executing the animation. This is something I do need to improve upon to remember to do a bar sheet before each exercise so that I wouldn't have troubles later on in stop motion. In hindsight I should've tried to get my concentration boosted and had something to drink before the exercise so that I wouldn't be so tired and exhausted to help me better. In conclusion though I had done some good animation and saved time to do another animation to improve upon whilst I still had time to work on the subject.

In future I shall try to do a bar sheet from the reference footage so that I can better map out the movements. In addition, I would do the walking reference footage at different angles to get a better idea on the positioning of the arms, legs and feet, to save the frustration.