more practice

Just messing around, trying to get some different expression into some moves.

One thing I notice now that I've been animating fairly regularly -- and this applies to any kind of art I've ever done. There's a certain Art Making Mode that I sometimes go into... a super-patient mode where I'm completely unaware of the passage of time or of anything beyond what I"m doing. And when I go into this mode during animation, that's when I get really good results. I was in that mode when I did the Skull Love clip (well, the last 2 thirds of it anyway) and when I did the One Good Yank mime thing. But I was a bit impatient when I did the shrug tests.

You can see the difference. Watch Skull Love... notice at first things are pretty rough, but it smoothes out as I go.

I think it's alright that my sketches are a bit rough.... I was improvising, just messing around and making stuff up as I went... in some cases I really didn't even know what the next frame would be till I touched the puppet. I think the shrug tests were a step beyond what I've done before in terms of difficulty because I was aiming for expression, as opposed to simply putting the puppet through the motions smoothly. The 2 shrugs are very different (and yes, as Prosser mentioned on my YouTube page, it IS difficult to shrug without collarbones!). I don't like the weird head shake on the second one... it didn't work the way I wanted it to. And everything after that is weird too... doesn't match the aggressiveness of the beginning of the shrug. But I thought I'd go ahead and post these attempts anyway. Hopefully in the future I'll do some more successful ones. But there's no failure in practice -- the whole point is just to keep myself animating and trying things that are beyond my comfort zone.

There are a couple of false starts included, and at the end of the clip I tried an idea for how to get Hoppy across the room really fast. He needs to move like a jackrabbit on speed, but with those short little legs I need to find some alternative way to get him there.... if I actually animate the legs using ease-ins and ease-outs for every step he can't go fast enough!!

Not quite there yet, but it's a start. I'll try a few different ideas as I progress.