Making the most of your time

Its insane to pick out a specific article from the Tricks and Tips blog because there is so much good stuff there. But I was attracted to this piece by Kenny Roy about animating aiming for quality instead of quantity. I'm adding it to the Getting started section.

Hmmmm, now the astute reader may sense a possible contradiction here, seeing as how I'm the guy tells you, you should be animation 60 frames a day. BUT!! (he cried making a quick side step) I'm afraid I don't see a contradiction here at all. Some students would love to give me ultimatums when I was teaching, "but you told me to do this and I can't do that at the same time." Brace yourself for my stock standard reply......

I WANT MY CAKE AND EAT IT TO!!!! BWAAA HAAA HAA HAAAA HAAAA !

8 comments:

Frank said...

Ah, yes the joyful laughter that punctuated so many of our debates.

The Tips & Tricks blog is a great resource and all animation students should be subscribed to it.

60 frames of good quality animation... GO FOR IT.

Yup, I'm talking to you students surfing past :)

hee, hee, hee, her

Frank said...

The Tips & Tricks post, what a fantastic post.

Particularly where Kenny advises to get the character up out of low energy situations like behind desks.

I reckon that goes for students as well as our characters. It's no wonder we lapse into animating characters sitting at desks because that's where we are pretty much all of the time (like even now!).

In life drawing classes our teacher strongly encourages participants to stand and draw at the easel and use our whole body to make the marks.

Our character animation mentor insists we get up and act things out.

I think that part about getting the character up and moving around, working the poses and gestures is animation gold.

Mitch said...

I've gotta say with me, 60 two-dimentional frames at 12 frames per second is a nice start for animating roughly before sending it into maya. the majority of the work is done already and then it is boosted up into a polished 120 frames worth of goodness. I find with this time length you have greater opportunities to show more depth to the character, and its not too much to get in the way of other things you should probably be doing in life like remembering to feed the cat.

Ian said...

You need to apreciate mitch that there are depths of character that you don't even see at the moment. You are one of the very few students I have ever known who has a tendancy to produce to much, always flying onto the next thing, and sometimes missing subtleties that others catch (Codey is the only other one I can remember who was the same). I think Kenny's advice is tailor made for you, try stick with something and taking it to the next level. Not advice I give often, because I'm usually worried about how much a student is managing to produce, but something you will need to face up to if your gona kick it up a notch (as is required) ;)

Frank said...

Hey Mitch

Great to read that you're into producing those 60 frames = 2 seconds of animation per day.

I'd suggest to plan it out at 24 or 25 fps in Flash or Pencil. On 'twos'. That way there's no fooling about trying to convert frame rates before taking it into Maya.

Because that is where you are taking the line tests, obviously.

Obviously ;)

No disrespeck to Ians "Framerate Shmamerate" ARC post meant here.

Frank said...

Always feed the cat!

Raye Newman said...

Hey Ian, thanks for the coming in to talk to us today. I think you're doing great things for the animation community especially with the arc. Can you remind me where you got that rig? Does it include the sword and shield?

Cheers

Frank said...

Hey Raye

I sent you another email. The first one was that Ian recommended trying TJ Phan's rig (Rohan) researchable from his blog.