Animation Studies: 12 Principles of animation

For this assignment I had a rough idea of what I wanted to do. I did research on different animation styles and decided I want to make something that resembles ”Looney Tunes”.

I did a few animation tests to get used to the rig.

So the first thing I did was a straight away animation. I was thinking about the weight of the character, proportions, etc. and how that might affect it’s movements. To me the logical thing to do was to make him fall since the body looks like it would be easily pushed off balance because of the proportions of the legs. To me the character seemed clumsy and heavy.

Going back to getting used to the rig I did a walk cycle on 12’s for practice.

And from there I continued to develop the character.

I did a double bounce walk on 16’s

And I took some advice from Mike to start the animation from the hips. So usually at the first stages my animation would look like this.

So that really helped me get a good idea of timing and if I should change anything early on. I also made sure to keep in mind the point of balance and not make the character look like it’s walking on the moon.

Using references helped me a lot with timing as well. Most of my inspiration and references I took from ”The Animator’s Survival Kit”.

This is the base I used for the double bounce. There is a part in the book that talks about walk cycles and different ways to take a walk cycle a break it into key moments in order to change it a bit (adding more character to the walk and stuff like that).

The part that really inspired me was taking something that would look unnatural and making it look natural in the animation. Taking advantage of squash and stretch as well as exaggeration were the things I focused the most on.

I wanted to push it further and added a hat to add more character to the character.

And here’s a front view to show the point of balance.

So, I looked back at my first test and thought it would be interesting if I made a small sketch based on everything I learned.

I don’t really like the final result. The hat is a bit floaty and it feels like some of the actions take way to long. It was a good learning experience that showed me I definitely need to practice animating a lot during the summer.