backgrounds, gestures, and insane animators
So, with a new quarter comes a new set of classes. I’ve been working on everything from CG sculptures of sea vessels from
| Dinotopia to struggling with composition in background designing. Clearly I excel more so in the character design category versus BG design. I’m not really one for all the ruler usage. I suppose you don’t always have to use rulers and so forth, but for this class things are fairly precise. We’ve watched a lot of the Gnomon Work Shoppe videos on BG design, and they can be both a bit intimidating and convoluted in structure. Sometimes these guys just lose themselves in the work and the end result is so much organized chaos, nothing can be distinguished. It almost seems like abstract BG design for 2D animators is what we’re watching. I really had hoped to get into composition with this class, especially lighting and color composition. I tend to lean more towards organic shapes (not because I’m lazy or something) but because man-made structures are very stifling, Closter phobic, four sided, and unimaginative. We constrict ourselves to laws that o not allow us to truly be creative. I love to emulate nature in my structure designs, the free flowing lines, and the a-symmetry, its all so visually poetic.
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I’ve been having a bit of fun in my Animation IV class (I don’t know what the IV is about, because I don’t remember taking animation III) so we’ve been doing a lot of movement exercises using Wacom tablets to go over our hand drawn gesture drawings. So far I’m enjoying it, and the teacher really seems to enjoy animation so that makes me feel a bit more comfortable. Some of the teachers here give you the impression they’re just here to collect a paycheck (sad). So I’m surrounded by several of the most talented animation students I have ever seen. Seriously the guys and gals have a great sense of motion anatomy and all the fundamentals of what it takes to have well-rounded animation. So, I did my first assignment which was to take make gesture drawings depicting emotion, pick two, use them as the first and last key frames and animate the in-betweens.
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It was a blast, I felt pretty confident with my characters movement. I could have maybe pushed him a little farther, but I’ll save that stuff for my personal works like this.
I swear this class has convinced me that animators are by far the craziest people on the face of the planet, it’s non stop insanity in there. The air is filled with animation quotes (in full cartoon voice); wacky physical gags during presentations and just all around loonery. Actually many of my animation classes are like this, but at 8am it seems to be a bit more amplified. Since we all have to be at school so early I guess we’re all just a bit sleep deprived, and that makes for a VERY bizarre class experience.
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