Principles of Animation Study
As part of a personal project, I decided to do an in depth study on the principles of animation and make short animated pieces inspired by them. I used this as an opportunity to play around with different visual styles, softwares and aim to just have fun without being constrained to specific rules or guidelines.
Sweet and Shred
Sweet & Shred was inspired specifically by the animation principle “anticipation”.
My biggest obstacle for this project was more on the technical side of things as I didn’t have much experience with making 3D work in a cartoon-ey visual style.
When forming the idea, I really wanted to have a smear frame in between the swing of the racket so the challenge for me was how to implement it in the animation.
Styleframes
Originally I thought that using a pose morph would’ve been best suited for this type of effect however countless problems appeared when trying to morph from a normal tennis racket to a smeared and stretched one.
The Solution to this turned out to be a lot more simpler than I originally thought. While I wasn’t able to figure out the pose morph problems, I decided to use a different method. I made 2 different versions of the racket. And then mid swing, have the normal racket swap with the smeared rackets using the display tags in Cinema 4D. This ended up saving a lot of time and resulted in a satisfying smear frame for the project.
Special Delivery!
Special Delivery was inspired by the animation principle “Follow through and Overlapping”
I think one of the biggest difficulties of these short studies was coming up with original ideas to portray these principles.
To help with this, I found that frequently going on walks with my notebook and writing words inspired by the things around me would help dramatically with creators block.
