Reflect on the practice you have undertaken in class today and during this week relating to your IOL project.
What was the main intention/focus of this weeks practice for you?
To revisit my approach to my slow dance pencil test as I’m unhappy with the current arm positions.
Were there any specific technical/narrative/visual/movement or design problems guiding your practice?
The movement in the elbows don’t follow arcs properly due to varying volume.
How did you go about your making endeavour relating to this intention?
Maddy suggested keeping bodies as shapes and having limbs as skeletons, consisting of lines and dots for joins to more clearly plan their curves and arcs. This creates more clarity in the characters rather than having to animate both upper bodies all at once.
How successful were you with this practice? How do you know?
This skeleton approach made it easier to track the arc of the elbows as I only had to animate the characters in stages, i.e. bodies, shoulders, hands then elbows. The spheres were then added on the top afterwards.
Have you come across any new related works that inform your larger IOL project for the semester?
Nick suggested that I look into Laban’s Eight Efforts as a way to help inform my approach to conveying movement & motion in actions. The Laban’s research helps categorise actions into eight distinct types of motion, highlighting the variations in the different types of movement. Using this, you can express their internal thoughts by thinking about how they’re moving and why.
What do you need to iterate further or reiterate in terms of your past practice in coming weeks?
To further iterate my past practices I will apply Laban’s Eight Efforts to my continued works and analyse how these categorisations inform the character movements and therefore inform the expression of the characters.
Describe one insight you have had about your practice this week?
One insight I’ve had about my practice this week is that I tend to animate in a pose-to-pose mindset even when working with breakdowns and in-betweens. This means that I’m not often considering the character as multiple individual parts that can be animated one by one. It would be valuable for me to animate simplified shapes individually to convey their arcs before trying to attach the entire character drawings.
