Over the past two weeks, I assisted Lily Jenkins with an animation project based on her daily life drawings. Her unique art style immediately caught my eyes once I watched her animatic, as the composition, timing, and sound all worked together seamlessly to create a captivating film, the character performance she designed was also more subtle and natural which complement her personal style further. I found my drawing style was also quite compatible with hers as I am more used to drawing human figures as opposed to cartoonish characters.
The first task Lily gave me was to create two walk cycles. While the original file was in TVpaint, I was unable to access it due to not having a license and being unable to come to school every day. However, Lily assured me that it was for reference only, and the final animation would be completed on paper. This made me realized I should invest in a TVpaint license as soon as possible, as it is a widely used industry standard software.
The walk cycle itself was 3 seconds long, with most frames on either 3s or 4s, meaning that I only needed to focus on the basic contact, pass, up, and down poses. However, the lack of proper character designs was a challenge and I needed to adapt the existing sketches Lily gave me to recreate her style as closely as possible. I was able to complete the task in a week and received positive feedback from Lily, though I did notice that the size of the male character’s head changed quite a bit while walking, which could have been improved upon.
The second task was to animate a pub scene with three characters drinking and vaping. Although there was no comprehensive character design only a rough sketch, I found the characteristics of each figure were already effectively conveyed. I complete the animation of the girl with the ponytail taking a sip of her drink and combing through her hair by utilizing the body acting exercise techniques I had previously learned. As this action involved a lot of hand movement, my experience in the weekly life drawing class proved to be especially helpful in terms of understanding hand anatomy, and Lily was quite happy with the outcome. However I personally felt that the head movement was a bit unnatural and could have been further experimented with. Unfortunately, I was unable to finish animating the other two characters due to time constraints, but I believe that as my skills improve, I will be able to work more efficiently.
Overall it was a very fulfilling experience as it allowed me to put the animation skills I had learned throughout the course into practice.