Animation Principles - Highlight Reel

I found that my strongest work from the 12 principal tasks were the pre-production drawings, such as the solid drawing exercises, appeal character design and staging splash page. I liked the solid drawing because the dynamic poses gave the character a weight that made him more believable. The character design was successful in my opinion because he had quite a bit of appeal - his appearance alone gave an indication to his personality, and the set of poses and facial expressions enhanced his shyness and agitation. The splash poster was my favourite final outcome, due to its cleanness as a final image, as well as how successfully I believe I achieved the staging task. I found that it clearly demonstrates unease, and I focused quite a bit on how I wanted to achieve that with composition.

For the animations, my favourite was the rocket for the anticipation as I managed to include several different principles (such as the squash before take off), resulting in a more complete feeling animation. Furthermore I thought the arc of the flight was satisfying and spaced well. 

Whilst I thought my pose to pose animation was successful, I found the stop motion straight ahead animation unsuccessful as there was no goal for the animation and thus it seemed unmotivated. Furthermore I could have been much more ambitious and experimental with the freedom straight ahead animation allows. I also found that the plasticine was very hard to work with, and I didn't enjoy animating using stop motion. Likewise with the stop motion arc of the hand flick-kicking the fly, I found it tricky to work with and couldn't achieve fluid arcs. 

Timing was a principle that I understood quite well, and the activity of deliberately fudging the timing worked really well for me, however I had more trouble with spacing. I understood the concepts of it, however when applying them I wasn't very accurate, and found my animations to be too linear. The easy ease was successful however, except for the fact that I had one frame in the middle which reduces the effect slightly.

I understood squash and stretch quite well, however the exercieses I did for the principle didn't show it effectively and therefore I didn't include them in the reel. The rocket was a better example of squash and stretch than the bouncing balls, due to the shadows making the distortion less obvious. The flipbook was quite hard to capture, as the main squash happened towards the end so there weren't enough pages for a smooth playback.

Finally, follow through and overlap was probably my least favourite task, as I didn't enjoy working straight ahead, and working with very thin lines meant that accuracy was very important. I did multiple passes of the follow through, however it still didn't look smooth.