8: Animation Addict

Oooh, look at me, I'm actually posting about the animation I did on the day I did the animation. (I usually post the day after, which is why all the posts say 12am.)

Anyways, I caved in to my animation addiction. I moved my stuff downstairs so that I could animate on my main computer. I don't really remember all the settings, so hopefully it will look ok.

Today, I worked on the bicycle kick. I'm not all that pleased with it. It's hard to do bicycle kicks in real time, I realize the majority of the time I see it, it's in slow motion. Well, except for the one I remember from Jackie Chan's "Gorgeous", which I should have watched and emulated, but I didn't, so I have a sucky bicycle kick.

Oh well.

It required me doing some frame editing.



The computer upstairs has a dark monitor, so what looks quite dark looks not so dark on other computers (although I think brightness is different between macs and pcs). So when it comes to post production, I usually darken all the frames. So I hade to make sure this computer is light enough!

As you can see from above, I used this long lego pole, which I think is a mast from a lego windsurf sail, and slotted it into the back of Maggie. I changed her torso so that it had the square indents in it, and I found the pole fits quite nicely in there. Normally, a regular pole which fits in the hands of a minifig and a stikfas would not fit in the square slots of a stikfas. However, because a slit is in this pole to allow for the sail (or whatever it's used for), it fits and wedges in quite nicely! Bonus!

I'm not all that pleased with this kick. The arms are not expressive enough, the kick is way too fast, and in order for me to slow it down a tad, I doubled some frames in there. Thus, it looks a bit more choppy than usual. I also don't like how the hair is done either.

Remember when I said I was getting the hang of how the hair should move? I was wrong.

And the downstairs table is not very stable. My knee bumped it on frame 19. Since I was editing each frame anyways, and most of the ground isn't visible, I just easily edited in the ground from frame 16. But it's pretty annoying if you've spent an hour and 45 minutes, and then your knee bumps the table. Actually, the whole animating took an hour and 45 minutes, for barely a second.

I'm proceeding at an alarming rate.

Anyways, I'm excited because I'm getting closed to finishing Scene 2. Well, I'm more than halfway finished, so I can't wait till I get the chance to blog that it's done! Scene 3 and 4 will be the most difficult of course, but I'll worry about that later. I can just imagine my productivity then. This is going to take me till summer.

Oh, it's January 1st! Happy New Year!