Sketches

Squirrel Animation

Finally finished the first draft of my squirrel animation!



Squirrel Animation from James Saunders on Vimeo.


Overall i'm pretty happy with how it looks.

One of the hardest parts was trying to get the tail overlap looking believable with the jumps. It would very quickly turn unappealing and stiff. By dealing with the root of the tail first and then animating outwards I could get quite a nice effect quite quickly.

I highly recommend using the Squirrels Rig. It's free and super fun to use.

On to the next one!

Back to Basics - Squirrel Animation

I was halfway through another shot using the JACK rig from Animsquad when I felt like I was getting swamped with the technicalities of Maya and losing sight of the principles of animation.

So I've put that animation on hold for now and started work on a new project using the Squirrels rig from animation mentor:

Before I decided what to do I looked at some progress reels from Animation Mentor students. I wanted to see what type of animations they were doing to get the basics down. There were loads of really nice walk cycles, a few pantomime shots and a couple of bouncing ball exercises. I noticed how energetic and cartoony the animation was and thought it would be interesting to try and go for the same style. It would also be a nice change from the slightly more restrained animation I was doing with JACK. 

The 'ball with a tail' exercise felt like a good one to do as it encompassed most of the qualities I wanted to get better at such as fun timing, rhythm, squash and stretch and personality.

The idea I came up with was to have an acorn fall out of a tree and then have the squirrel chase after it. It's not quite finished yet but below are the progress of my arcs and timing of the animation:

 Rough sketch of the overall idea and arcs I wanted.

I then filmed video reference and animated some initial arcs. The reference was valuable to help get a sense of timing and rhythm to the squirrel jumping around the tree  (I pretended my fingers were the squirrel!).

 Refined arcs and timing. I removed some the of the jumps as it all felt a bit too frenetic.

Final arcs and timing of the shot. Quite a bit of difference from when I started.

Should be a few more days until the first draft of the animation is done :)

In the meantime here is some animation of Scrat from Ice Age that I took inspiration from: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etKCHLgW_o0

Quick Life Drawing Sketches

Just a couple quick life drawing done over 5 - 10 minutes. Trying to keep up the practice!

Film Sketching - E.T.

I saw a blog post this morning on cartoonbrew about the value in sketching out a film sequence or even an entire film. (Check here for the original post: http://storyshots.tumblr.com)

It totally makes sense to do this as it forces you to notice all the different elements of visual storytelling. Below are some examples I sketched out the opening scene for E.T. and I've already learnt a ton. I didn't focus so much on detail as they are more like notes to myself than presentable drawings. I'm definitely going to do more of this when I have a spare moment.