Wednesday, December 21, 2005

1: The Beginning


Stikfas are hard to animate.

Well, not that hard, but we'll get to that. The first thing I had to do was fix my computer. It was having all sorts of problems, couldn't get the network working, couldn't get the webcam working, couldn't keep it from freezing or crashing on me. Good grief.

Gave me a chance to clean up all those little plastic sticky outy doohicky thingys left from the plastic frame. A nail cutter was quite useful, but there are these big white blotches still. Ah well.

I don't have a storyboard for this movie. It's mostly fluid fight scenes, and the angles I always play around in my head. I do have the main fight scenes figured out. So I have it in chunks. I don't know how it's going to end though, haven't figure that out yet. :)

Anyways, once my computer woes were fixed, I decided to start on the first scene, the girl, we'll call her Maggie, wakes up on the platform. Immediately, I realize it's hard to keep her from moving around because her joints are too stiff. I also don't know how to animate the hair well. I tried a shot of her getting up, then a closeup.

I was interrupted then and stopped there.

When I came back, I gave up on that and decided on having the fight between the red kicker and the green puncher. Knowing that I needed something more secure than blue tac to stick these guys to the base, I used Lego pieces which snapped quite nicely onto the legs, replacing the feet. With these, they could stand up properly and were quite sturdy.

Now it's the first attack for those two, and red kicker is supposed to do a high roundhouse to the head, while Maggie dodges and then elbows the green puncher. I got so far as having red kicker's leg go up, and then I stopped. Not only was it close to 1am, but it already looked off.

I stopped, and decided to do a test shot of just red kicker alone, hoping I would get the timing right. Doing it in 30fps for the faster shots, I know my regular 15fps sense of timing and spacing is skewing things. I was able to do a roundhouse kick with red kicker (about 15 frames) in about five minutes though (for a 1 second kick) and it looked ok. I don't want the initial crane stance to be too slow, but slower than the actual kick. The follow through would gradually slow down. It does look relatively natural, although because it's so fast, it doesn't look like red kicker is actually turning. It just looks like the kick comes through and the body almost stays still.

Good enough though, hopefully I will be able to combine the movements of Maggie to dodge. I don't know about trying to get green puncher to move in, but we'll see.