I have finally started to learn animation officially. Every day, my practice was drawing or learning about animation, which made me feel like I was in heaven.
To me animation is a kind of magic, creating a whole new world with just pen and paper. Now, I’m going to start learning this magic.
Here is my daily record of learning magic.
Week 1(2021.9.27-10.3)
Arriving in London on the day of the start of the school year, everything was a bit of a rush, but amazingly, I didn’t feel strange.
I was pleasantly surprised by my first Animation Workshop on Wednesday. We played different characters to shape a story together and felt how different people would react in different situations.
I was unable to attend an offline event in isolation and missed the karaoke night prepared by Steve, but I think there will be another opportunity afterwards. The first week was a bit busy with adjusting to jet lag and settling into life, and I didn’t pay much attention to animation other than the usual life sketches. Oh yeah, about the sketching, I think I’ll start a new site to document my whole process.
Week 2(2021.10.4-10.10)
Still in Self-isolation, so I continue to live in online classes.
This week in Animation Workshop we worked on the classic bouncy ball, drawing 5 different ball movements falling from a height. This was my first real formal study of the fundamentals of animation, as my original subject is not animation. In order to show us the realistic and concrete movements of the different balls, Steve brought balls of different materials and showed them to us live. After practising on my own, I found out that animation fundamentals are not as easy as I thought, but they are more fun than I thought!
For the 5 different materials of the bouncy ball, here is my video work:
When I first finished drawing it, I thought it was perfect and very true to the real world. But in conclusion now, when I uploaded the animation, I found that many parts were very stiff and not at all realistic and natural. It turns out that watching a piece for a long time can create aesthetic fatigue, and in turn, you can’t see what the problem is. After that, I need to look back at my previous work regularly to find the problems and then correct them.
Week 3(2021.10.11-10.17)
follow animation
Week 4(2021.10.18-10.24)
diving animation
Week 5(2021.10.25-10.31)
Lift puppy animation keyframe
With the limited time, I only finished the keyframes, but it is really helpful to be a reference when I redrew the lifting.
I re-drew the lift animation.