Since I've never worked with animation before, I decided to wait until later in the week before I started working on it so I got as much practice in class before starting.
Monday 14-16: Practice what I've learnt in class.
Tuesday 14-16: Practice what I've learnt in class, get an idea of what I'm able to do in the given timeframe.
Wednesday 14-19: Plan out the story and poses before I start using Maya. (I actually started working this day after school and got most of the animation down.)
Thursday 14-20: Animate and get most of the animation down. (Got some good feedback this morning on what to tweak from our teacher since I had gotten so much work done the day before.)
Friday 09-16: Polish and tweak the animation, batch render and make the video. (Tweaked some more stuff, rendering out some new frames to make the video better.)
Drawing
This week we drew some more stick figures, working mainly on gestures and CSI (The shapes in which most drawings are made of, Cs Ss and Is).
Idea development
My idea this week was to have the robot lying on the ground, bored out of its (artificial) mind, when a ball rolls in and brightens the day! The robot will then play with it, but in the end lose it and get bummed out again.
First I wrote down my idea, which you can see was pretty basic just to get it down on paper, and then I drew in thumbnail poses that told the story more so I had more to work with. I also wrote down the frames where I imagined the poses would be in the timeline, but my final scene got 50 frames more than my original idea because otherwise everything would move so damn fast.
I also had planned to make the video loopable, so the starting pose and the final pose were exactly the same, but after talking to my teacher I decided against it since it'll just look weird if it isn't viewed looping.
Finished product
Self evaluation
This week I feel I did pretty well. When I first started doing animation I felt it was ridiculously hard and that I'd never understand it, but then I practiced more and concentrated when doing it, and I finally got a basic understanding of how the simple parts work, so I feel better prepared for the coming weeks when it gets more advanced.
