Currently browsing Posts Published March 2012

I did a lot of work on my spider-squashing animation this morning. Don’t worry, that’ll be finished soon, but as usual I’m doing a lot of learning and revising along the way. One thing I’m doing to facilitate that is animating in vague scribbles, rather than spending too much time laboring over each drawing. That way I won’t hesitate to revise drawings or throw them away completely.

Once I have the motion exactly how I want it, I can start to worry about filling in the details.

Ren and Stimpy animator John Kricfalusi has lots of great advice for budding animators, and makes a great argument for using simple early-1940s characters as the basis for animation practice. By then, animators had nailed down the best practices for animating, but were still tentative about moving beyond typical pear-shaped characters. So they’re perfect vehicles for a beginning animator to conceptualize how cartoons move and carry their weight, without getting thrown off by any zany stylization that later evolved.

So, after trying to animate a girl with a ponytail, I think my next twick will be the mercifully bald Elmer Fudd.

Hey look, I actually sat down and worked for a few hours! And I’ll spare you my customary apology for only cranking out 9 frames in that time; until I get the hang of this stuff–sometime in the Roaring 2020s–this pursuit will be more entertaining for me than it will for you.

As I mentioned before, I’m doing a very short animation in which Mary Rae sees a spider, hauls off and smashes it. This here is the seeing part, and it’s pretty much the same as the Kerkel clip from last week. However, I’ve also explored moving different parts at different speeds, such as her ponytail. In fact, when I come back to this, I’m going to give her ponytail a few more frames of drag; right now it settles too quickly, I think.