En Garde

Quick stop mo test I did. I covered one of the extras I made for my Kong abandoned project with some clay, it stayed pretty well (masking tape body, clay didn't slide off really at all).

Was partly an execercise in what it takes to get it onto the good camera (instead of the crappy web cam). 15 minutes of set up, running the camera into the computer through a tethering program, having the stop motion program watch that, and then having it saved externally onto my ipod. When the stopmo program was watching the folder the whole computer would lag. Someday I'll have to get a new compy, this one is at least 7 years old.

Need to put something like a tissue across the key board so I don't accidentally gum it up with clay.

What is the secret to keeping characters solidly connected to the ground when they're sitting or otherwise touching but not tied down? Guess I'll have to keep experimenting to find out.  There's a few spacing hiccups, that I'm going to blame on me not being as methodical as possible because I was starting to sweat being up so late past my bedtime with work and early rising children to answer to. (being a responsible adult is lame)

and here's the live cam. I had tried to make the little guy breathing like he was meditating, but with his legs rocking up as he rocked back it just looked amateur. But it was really nice to see the good camera's shots and actually see form and definition, instead of basically a silhouette.

Cameron Fielding on using Reference

Cameron Fielding did a talk at the pixel challenge conference a while back. Pretty interesting. 

  Cameron Fielding - Using reference from iAnimate on Vimeo.


what's important to look at (when looking at ref)

forget about "what pictures do I need to understand this" (don't worry about antic and follow thru poses and stuff)

walt stanchfield's books, you look at the model once and then not again and you try and draw what struck you as important from their pose

we have to apply this exact same idea to reference

go through the ref picking out still frames to describe the video (like you were going to make a photo comic book of the ref)

not looking for story poses or extremes, looking for the things that make you want to animate the shot

these are the poses you are going to milk later, you are going to try the hardest to preserve these when your polishing

drawing helps to dispel mystery:
draw your first impression poses, it reveals to yourself what it is you like about the pose, you'll find yourself drawing the same bit over and over

you're trying to find what it is that's a struggle to draw, the thing you can't quite get is what you love about it, it'll give you a solid understanding of what part to focus on and is important when you take it to 3D
 
* found on animator's resource (which I just found and is full of gold)

Edgar Wright on Close Ups

on using closeups to control the pacing, and intro exiting a scene