Jamie Gone Dun a Weblog

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Not mine… Clive James’.

Study: Multiple Stab Wounds May Be Harmful To Monkeys

I saw ‘List of Demands’ on 120 Minutes a few years ago and really liked it, so downloaded the single (including the sweet Kid 606 remix). I didn’t take it any further, but had it in my head that this was a guy who had important things to say.

A month or so ago, I read his ‘Open Letter to Oprah Winfrey’ on the Strange Famous Forum and was inspired enough to buy Said the Shotgun to the Head, which totally blew me away.

Anyway, I’m writing this cos I bought Saul’s self-titled album the other day, and it’s awesome! Check out both his music and writing if you get chance.

http://www.saulwilliams.com

Woo! It’s like this, but you can touch it and even frame it:

James Jean is my new hero!

I’m waiting on a print of a different ‘Recess’ image, tho it’s worth checking out his whole portfolio. Awesome!

A quick break from my rudimentary drawn animation fumblings to bring you…

Combining the ‘bouncing solids’ with character animation, I present… a diving man.

Whats more difficult than a human (2 legged) walk cycle? You’re right, it’s a 4 legged walk cycle. The legs are drawn differently to show near and far legs. The whole idea with these line tests is to get the animation right without spending long on making the drawing beautiful, then you clean it up later once everything is moving as it should.

Interesting fact - I’ve done a natural animal walk cycle here, but for comedy effect you can also use two human walk cycles, like a pantomime horse. Pluto is drawn like that (apparently, I haven’t checked).

Week 3, we start walk cycles. Pretty much THE fundamental idea to master in animation. Aside from my amazing ball rolling and bouncing in the previous two weeks, I’d only ever done motion graphics with video clips, text, bits of 3D and abstract stuff, so this is my first attempt at character animation. It’s pretty much straight copied from the examples we were given, still, gotta start somewhere, and it’s good practice for drawing ‘on model’.

Picking something up off the floor! It’s… like… all about acting… and weight… and balance. As with most of these line tests, these are just the key frames, I didn’t have time in the sessions to ‘tween them. Maybe one day I will. Probably just do something new instead.

I been doing a course in Drawn Animation at Central Saint Martins, so I thought I’d kick off my Vimeo account by posting my line tests of the stuff we’ve been learning. Tho I’ve done plenty of software animation before, I’d never done any using just drawings, so bear with me, things get better!

This one was just to teach us the principles of keys, breakdowns and tweens, plus give us a bit of practice in ‘flipping, flicking and rolling’…

The next week, we did ‘Animating Solids’. Not those sort of solids, thanks Simon. This is quite obviously a ball rolling off of a building/wall and doing a bit of ’squash and stretch’ as it bounces along

Reggie Watts: Little Pumpkin from Jakob Lodwick and Vimeo.

(Press the little ‘four directional arrows’ button in the bottom right corner to experience it in all it’s full screen glory.)