Final Project: ANM 302 - Week 15

So, this is it, the finished final project in ANM302. It's done. Am I happy with it? Well, am I ever happy with anything I do? I would have liked to tweak the newton field of the trailer more and worked on the turbulence field too. The particle spray from the missile really should be more smokey and it should shoot out of the back of the bazooka. And, the animation of the character is stiff, but it's done. And there is always the future to rework it for the demo reel. I guess that gives me something to look forward too!

167 Hours: ANM302 – Week 14

One hundred sixty seven hours. That's how much time I have left to complete my final project. That seems like a lot of time, doesn't it? But let's back out sleep (64 hours), work/school/driving (50 hours), preparing for the day/eating (16.5 hours) which leaves 36.5 hours. Of course some of that will be taken up by working on other projects and doing a take home final exam. Why am I doing all this math when I should be working on my project? Simply because I have nothing else to share in this final blog entry. It's been a good run – I like SFX in 3D. I have pieces from the class that I want to include in my demo reel and I even think I might want to follow a career in simulations/visualizations. I don't think it gets better than that. Well, except finishing the my final project and ending this semester.

The End: ANM201 – Week 14

This is it. The final push. One last week of frantic work and it will all be over. I know I have a lot of work ahead of me, but I can really start to feel the pressure coming off simply because I can now see the end of the semester approaching. Looking back, it was not a great semester – there were WAY too may emotional lows. I even failed to complete a project. Yet, even with that having been said, I've learned a fair bit and advanced as an animator. I've figured out a new technique to use in After Effects. I've produced a couple of pieces that will wind up in my demo reel and I've made a huge head start on producing my Sophomore film. That alone has made the semester worth while. So now I'm allowing myself a brief moment of joy, before I get back to the grind of finishing my final project. I have a feeling it will be a winner.

The “Learning Maya Blues”: ANM302 – Week 13

3D animation is a funny thing to me. There are times that I really get into modeling, or skinning, or animating, or SFX but it never all happens at the same time. I always seem to start off doing whatever needs to be done with a great deal of frustration. I cannot figure out how I'm supposed to do whatever it is that I'm supposed to do because it's been so long since I did it last that I've forgotten the basics. Then, eventually, I hit my stride and blow through it only to start some new aspect of the project and run into the same wall. I'm sure it's a combination of my inexperience with Maya and the fact that it's and incredibly “deep” program (so much so that virtually everyone in the industry specializes in a particular facet). Needless to say I'm running into the situation with my final project since it requires modeling, animation, and several special effects. The thing is I like 3D animation and working with Maya...it's just that I hate it at the same time. Ah well, that's life.

Time: ANM201 – Week 13

So, last week I had a brilliant idea on how to make my animated film look and feel like I had actually hand-drawn every frame. It was seriously great. This week, however, I've had a bit of a reality check. After half implementing the technique to get the boiling hold – which is gorgeous – I realized that the time it takes to do the actual animation a few frames at a time is going to take WAY longer that I had first thought. Thus, I am back to using straight Puppet-Pin animation to get the characters to move the way I want. Hopefully the smoothness of this animation won't detract from the over all look. We'll see how it turns out.

Bazookas: ANM302 – Week 12

I like to blow things up. Maybe it's because when I grew up the Cold War was still on and all we had to play with were war toys. Maybe it's because I used to stay up late to watch the Muppets on the Ed Sullivan Show and the skit would inevitably end with something exploding (or Kermit getting eaten my a monster – I had nightmares!). In any event, I have chosen the explosion effect in Maya to be the main point of my final project in this class. To that end, I intend to animate an generic character rig, taking a bazooka, firing it at a small trailer (yes, that's something from my childhood too – my parents would drag me on camping trips in our trailer – I hated it!), causing the trailer to explode into a million pieces with a giant fireball. Fun, huh? So I have to model the bazooka, model the missile, model the trailer, animate the character and the missile, create a smoke trail for the missile, make the glass in the window of the trailer shatter when the missile hits it, make the trailer shatter into a million pieces while its associated bits go flying, and create a giant fireball to go along with all of it. Whew! Hopefully I haven't bitten of more than I can chew. We'll see...

Inspiration: ANM201 – Week 12

This may sound strange, but I get some of my best ideas while in the shower. Perhaps it's the mindless activity of washing that allows my mind to wander, or maybe it's the invigorating spray of the water, either way something brilliant inevitably comes to me there. Yesterday it was an idea for animating a scene from my Sophomore film project – which will be my final project in this class. Originally, the film was to have been hand-drawn but after estimating production time at nearly a year, I knew that was out of the question. My adviser suggested doing the animation in After Effects with the puppet pin tool. That's a great idea, but it veers heavily away from the look I wanted with hand-drawn and it's rough boiling holds. Of course I can simply pre-compose a boiling hold for all the parts of the character in AE, and them animate them with rotation and puppet pins, but the motion will still be smooth from keyframe to key frame. That's when inspiration hit me. To achieve the “jerkiness” of hand-drawn animation what I'm going to do is “jump cut” the pieces to move them. In other words, for each drawing of an arm moving up, I'm going to insert a separate pre-composed boiling hold of the arm. This should give me the roughness I'm looking for. I can then use the puppet pin tool to shape the generic pieces into whatever form I need at the time. We'll give this a try, see how it looks, and more importantly – how long it takes. Next semester is going to go very fast and I want to be done with the film in time for its premier...

Explosions: ANM302 – Week 11

This week I'm working on a series of tutorials about explosions. In fact, by the end, I will have blown up a gas station in a huge fireball, and ignited the two gas pumps after taking them out with the debris field/shock wave. I absolutely love this!!! Building an explosion is an extension of creating fire in Maya, it uses the same principles of fuel and temperature and incandescence and such but in different combinations. There a lots of very subtle variations that have to be tweaked to get it to look just right – other wise you just have a big blob of mushy looking stuff that really doesn't look like an explosion at all. It's tough, but I'm enjoying it. In fact I might just use this as the basis for my final project. We'll see. In the meantime, I am reminded of famous words of John Candy from Second City TV: “She blowed up! She blowed up real good!”

Emotion: ANM201 – Week 11

To tell a story properly, you have to make your audience engrossed in it – get them to willingly suspend their disbelief. One of the best ways to do that is to have your characters placed in situations and act in believable, empathetic ways, that will evoke and emotional response. Remember, the best art is that which evokes and emotional response and that especially goes for animation. This week, we've been given the spec to create a 10 to 30 second animation in After Effects that expresses an emotion. The easiest way out of this one would be to show despair or sadness – it's simple to evoke that by playing a little sad music and and showing someone standing over a grave. But I want to try something harder. Fear. Well, more specifically terror and I think I know how. A slow reveal, accurate sound effects, and a sudden and abrupt ending should do the trick. Now, let us see if I can bring off the terror of an astronaut's last moments in deep space...

Fire: ANM302 – Week 10

Richard Pryor once said, “Fire is inspirational!” Of course, he was speaking of the time that he set his head ablaze while freebasing cocaine, but the gift of Prometheus really is inspirational. That's one of the reasons I've chosen to do the tutorials on fire this week. As I keep repeating through this blog, I love simulations, and using fluid mechanics to simulate a fire is, well, just plain cool. So, I'm working my way through the concepts of fuel, incandescence, temperature, ignition points and such in hopes of gleaning some understanding of how to make fire look real in Maya. It's a bit of a daunting task, but I'm up for it. Let's see if I can strike the flint just right and make a nice roaring fire!

The Puppet Pin: ANM201 – Week 10

So this week we are learning about the elusive “Puppet Pin” tool. This is something that I heard of back when I first learned Adobe After Effects, but never had the need or opportunity to use it – until now. As I understand it, the tool allows you to set what amount to joints in a solid bit-mapped image, and gives you the power to transform the image at those points as if you had run a series of bones with joints through it. It's seems to be a bit like rigging bones in Maya. Mind you it's going to be easier since it's in 2D and not 3D, but the problems of distorting the “rig” will probably still exist. This is going to be a big help to me, since I'm hoping to use it in my Sophomore film project (it will save me more than 6 months worth of work if it does), so needless to say I'm looking forward to learning this new tool.

Fire/Water/Smoke: ANM302 – Week 9

Well, the midterm project went over quite well and now we're moving on into fire, smoke, and water. As a reprieve, we've had the chance to view the movie “How To Train Your Dragon.” It's a light-hearted and diverting film (although I still don't think that Vikings had Scottish accents) with a great deal over VERY GOOD animation in it. Of course, what really makes this movie are all the effects shots – fire, water, and smoke. Needless to say, with fire-breating dragons as a main part of the cast you're going to need to animate of lot of fire, but it is quite amazing to see all the subtle (and gross) differences in what they have produced – from simple wooden pyres to transparent blue butane-eque jets. It's funny really, the more I learn about a subject (like SFX) the more I look closely at a film, and I find that it doesn't ruin the experience, because I know how the magic is done, but actually enhances it. I really do enjoy special effects.

2D Stop Motion: ANM201 – Week 9

Okay, so now we start a phase of transition. We are moving from traditionally hand-drawn 2D animation into working with Adobe After Effects, and to segue into it we are doing a traditional 2D stop motion piece of animation. Build a puppet, set up a ten second story, shoot it one frame at a time on a camera, then polish it in either Premiere of After Effects. Well, this has been a fun project – though as always I have over engineered the model. My King Ghidorah has WAY too many joints for a simple ten second shot. Oh well. I think I should have shot more cells, but I can package what I have fairly nicely and do some padding with interstitial text. Once I through in some music and sound FX it should play fairly well. We'll see so stay tuned.

Midterm Project: ANM302 – Week 8

Okay, so I have spent two weeks working on my midterm project. I have spend days adjusting and readjusting setting for the smoke plume, scrutinized camera angles, rendered animation frames throughout the over night hours, tweaked and re-tweaked the adjustment settings in After Effects to get the look just right, and finally rushed to complete the project at the last moment. Yet, now when I look at the piece, I feel disappointed. I looks as if I just shot footage of a smokestack with smoke billowing out of it. Which, of course, is what it is supposed to look like. It's not an over the top shot, it's very, very, very, very, very subtle. So subtle that you really can't tell I did anything – which is kind of disappointing. However, if that kind of subtly will get me a job somewhere, I'm willing to live with the disappointment.

Frustration: ANM201 – Week 8

Simply put, I have failed. I hate failing. Due to work, sickness, relationship problems, school, drive times, traffic tickets, and overall stress I have failed. I have failed to get my perspective weight project in on time. In fact, I have barely gotten anything done on it at all beyond the basic keyframes and a tiny bit of animation which has to be thrown away because it leads to a very difficult connecting piece which at my skill level and frustration level is near to impossible. I am tired, worn down, and burned out. At this point I am simply going to shelf this project and come back to it when I can. I will come back to it because I cannot stand to leave things undone. I may not be worth anything at that point in terms of a grade, but I will not leave it behind. I hate this, I really really do hate this.

Smoke: ANM302 – Week 7

Smoke gets in your eyes, right? Well, if it's coming out of a factory chimney nowadays (under current EPA regulations) it shouldn't be smoke, it should be water vapor. Which brings us to the subject of my midterm project: a factory smokestack emitting smoke. To accomplish this, I have been studying smokestacks and how the smoke emitted from them looks – it's quite different than that created in the tutorial I did for a volcano. Much thinner, much more whispy, much puffier – like clouds actually (which are also made of water vapor). I'm starting to set up my scene and experiment with settings to see how easy or hard it will be to get the right look. Of course, I'm going to have to get video of a non-smoking smokestack for the project and who knows how that will affect things once I bring everything into After Effects for compositing. As of right now, I'm shooting for light, white, puffy, and easily diffused. We'll see how it turns out...stay tuned.

Perspective Weight: ANM201 – Week 7

Right, so our next project we have to animate a character either picking up or moving an object, showing through the movements of the character that the object has some serious weight to it, all in 2D, hand drawn animation, set on a perspective grid, using perspective for the object and the character. Easy right? I'm not so certain on this one. We have a short turnaround time – well I do anyway due to my school/work/homework/sleep regiment. I'm planning what I think should be a fairly short animation: some basic anticipatory animation, the actual push against the box itself (the character will barely move it), and the post action (the box will fall back and crush the character). But to be honest, that is a lot of animation for me. In other words it is a lot of frames to be drawn, inked, scanned, adjusted, manipulated, fixed, re-inked, re-scanned, and finally rendered. I'm slow with this process and to simply use the computer is to produce less than desirable results. I don't like just getting by, I feel the need to be better than that, but there are a lot of things biding for my time now, and I'm not certain of this project. Stay tuned.

Destruction: ANM302 – Week 6

One of the best things about special effects is making the impossible possible. Of all those crazy things brought to “life” on the big screen a large subcategory involves destroying things. Anything from the end of the world as seen in 2012 to me simply smashing my name (as seen to the left) are possible in 3D animation programs like Maya. Needless to say, this is what we're working on right now in class. Let me tell you, breaking things is fun – however – just like particles, destroying an object in Maya takes a lot of computational power. Of course, one of the really neat things is that an object will never break the same way twice in Maya. Now this might seem problematic, but a clever feature available nowadays is caching. When you finally find just the right breaking sequence, you simply cache is and it's you're for good. Or at least until you find a better sequence. In any event, it's all terribly fun, and terribly complex. Yes, you guessed it, there are LOTS of settings that allow you to get a near infinitely wide set of destruction. That being said, I'm off to work on another tutorial that will simulate breaking into the crust of the plant. I'll let you know how that turns out, stay tuned...

Weight: ANM201 – Week 6

Wait, weight? It's not what you think it is. Most people think of weight as being how heavy something or someone is – but this confuses the concept of weight and mass, which are two very different things. Weight (W) is determined by multiplying the mass of an object (m) with the local gravitational constant (g), thus W=mg. What does that mean? In short the mass of an object always remains the same, but it's weight can change. Let me explain: a box that weighs one pound on Earth will only weigh 1/8^th of a pound on the Moon because the local gravitational constant is different. Does that make sense? Well, regardless we're now dealing with weight in terms of animation, which is a very tricky thing. Suppose you want to animate a character moving a massive object, how do you represent it? Are they going to float lightly along palming it in one hand, or are they going to struggle and strain? How do you represent that? Is it all done with short, halting steps or arms being stretched to the breaking point, while veins and eyes pop out? Or is it all in the anticipatory and post actions? This is an interesting topic and I'm looking forward to trying my hand at it. With a little more research I hope to be ready for my “speed exercise” on Wednesday and the ensuing project. Wish me luck, I'm sure to need it!

Cloth: ANM302 – Week 5

Cloth! WOW!!! No, wait. Before I go running off let's start with a bit of definition. Cloth - a flexible material consisting of a network of natural or artificial fibers. Simple stuff, right? We wear clothing made of cloth everyday. However, in terms of 3D animation we enter a whole new world of “gosh wow!” The key here is the flexibility. Cloth in Maya can simulate a range anywhere from watery silk, to heavy sheets of near steel in its appearance and interactions with other objects (and everything in between). What's more is that you not only make curtains for the window that you have just modeled, but add some wind and a few pieces of furniture for the curtains to interact with and suddenly the dreary architectural scene has come to live. Moreover, you can make the cloth destructible. In other words, when an object strikes it, the cloth will “break.” This opens up incredible new avenues in animating – and in creating realistic simulations. I've got to showcase may use of cloth in a homework assignment. Not sure if streamers off a oscillating fan will be the best or if I should do some wind blown curtains. Either way, it's going to be exciting!

Perspective: ANM 201 – Week 5

Do you know what a delineator is? He (or she) is a person who renders a realistic drawing of an architectural plan. The most famous and influential in modern times is Hugh Ferriss (ever wonder where Gotham City and Metropolis came from?). Anyway, to do render a drawing like this the delineator needs to use perspective - the appearance of things relative to one another as determined by their distance from the viewer. In other words, things that are closer are bigger and things that are far away are smaller. Simple, right? HA! Apply this powerful and important principle to 2D animation and you suddenly go from the Flintstones running across the TV screen through a near infinitely large house, to some very dramatic – and realistic – movement through 3D space. That in a nutshell is our assignment this week, to develop an short animation of a cube jumping from the distance to the foreground or vise-versa.

Again, it sounds really simple doesn't it?

Well, first you have to figure out the jump (anticipatory action, proper arc, ease-in/ease-out for the effects of gravity, and squash/stretch), then you have to figure out the movement in terms of perspective (small to large or large to small, and the points of the arc which are VERY different from a flat side shot, and the angle of the cube). This will be tricky. I'll let you know how it turns out. Stay tuned...

Fluids: ANM302 – Week 4

If you really, and I mean REALLY, want to blow someone's mind introduce them to the mathematics behind fluid mechanics. Yes, you are using mathematics to model how a fluid acts in a given situation. That's some serious, serious number crunching. This means two things: first, using Dynamics in Maya to simulate fluids and fluid-like substances is absolutely breath-taking; secondly, it means your computer is going to grind to a near halt attempting to do all the math! What is more amazing is the number of variables that you can tweak on a Maya fluid is quite large – you can do a LOT with it. We've already simulated squirting red dye into a glass of water (which slowed my home computer down so much that I thought it had crashed), simulated the Sun (which is fantastic since I love space simulations so much) and now – drum roll please – we're working on clouds. Dynamic clouds that will be able to be affected by wind and time. So, I can hear you to asking yourself, why not just use a picture of clouds and plunk it down behind the model of the airplane you just built? I'll tell you why, because I want to fly that model THROUGH the clouds and follow it with a camera. Understand that one of my great joys is playing a flight simulator called IL-2 Sturmovik, and the clouds in the game are great looking, but static. Now, in the newest version of this game the developers are touting the fact that they are going to have dynamic clouds – ones that would move, be affected by weather conditions, wind, and time of day. I wasn't that impressed until this week, when I learned just what goes into all of that. I'm really looking forward to delving further into fluids. The math is impossible to get my head around, but I do enjoy the end results.

Running Into A Wall: ANM 201 – Week 4

Right, I'm taking a moment form my usually happy and fairly upbeat discussion of what I'm doing/learning in Advanced 2D Animation to vent for a bit. We're still working on our run cycle projects – which is fine. Mine is still a ways from being done. The reasons for this are many fold. I get up, get ready for class, drive to school, attend class, eat lunch, drive to work, work, drive home, eat dinner and by about 8pm or so I am finally ready to work on homework. Well, no. Not really. I'm exhausted at that point. Adding to this I've been run through an emotional wringer due to events in my life recently (stress from work/school/finances, not to mention I haven't slept properly in nearly two months). I tried cutting my work time by moving to digital imaging for 2D animation, but it just doesn't work for me. I cannot seem to get the “feel” of drawing with a graphics tablet. Frustrating, but I can switch to pen and paper (traditional animation). It just takes longer AND I don't have a functioning scanner. To make matters worse, I went looking for a new scanner locally. No one carries them any more! To get a proper flatbed scanner I would need to order one online and wait two weeks for delivery. GAH! So, I'm going to work out my animation this afternoon. Ink it, and try to get into class slightly early to scan it (or photograph it on the test stand). One problem with this plan is class I have prior to ANM 201: ENG 260 – Acting for Animation. It's a fun class BUT the instructor is notorious for running long. So, there you have it. I keep getting frustrated, keep coming up with solutions, and seem to get foiled yet again.


It's been like this for a while, and I'm getting fed up with it.



However – and this is a very important addition to everything I've said here – I'm not going to give up. As bad as it gets (and at points it has gotten impossibly bad), I find that I cannot and will not stop. Life is hard and anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or trying to sell you something. I'll get through this animation and it will be up to my standards. End of venting session. Next week, I promise a more upbeat entry based on something new I've learned in class. Stay tuned...

Dynamics: ANM 302 – Week 3

Life is dynamic, or so they say. Who are “they” anyway, and why do they keep coming up with these pithy sayings? That question will have to wait. Right now we're going to talk Dynamics. I was about to say, not the kind of mathematical dynamics used in engineering which I flunked out of in college, but I would be wrong. It is that kind of dynamics. When you take and place a series of objects in a situation where one or more forces it applied and the objects interact, then you have dynamics. This is precisely the when I'm talking about in 3D animation. Dynamics allows you to set up a simulation (there's that wonderful word again) where you can have those nicely modeled object you built interact with one and other – as opposed to just having then pass harmlessly through each other, clipping away as they go. So, what was my introduction to this new wonder:  the classic physics collision, billiard balls. I have to tell you, it was a riot! Setting the balls up on the table, getting them some gravity, then “striking” them with a pool cue (an initial impulse) and watching them bounce around and smash into each other on the table was great. You'll note in my sample video above that I even broke the balls with too much force, sending one of they flying off the table. Cooler still in the one ball that is struck at such an incidental angle that it keeps on spinning to the end of the clip. All this from just a few clicks of the mouse. Stunning! I look forward to continuing with dynamics as we attempt to produce some realistic looking rain. I'll let you know how that works out next week. Until then, stay tuned...

More Running: ANM 201 – Week 3

So this week we are continuing our work with run cycles. To that end we video taped ourselves running – in the style we wanted to run – on a treadmill. Mind you, this is not for rotoscoping purposes. This is simply for reference. I tried to do a happy little jaunty run with my head up and leaning back. I don't think it came out that way, but hey, you work with what you have. Anyway, I'm currently working on perfecting the torso and leg movements before continuing this week with the head, arms, and secondary motion. What's secondary motion you ask? That's anything that moves because of the primary motion. For example, if I am wearing a scarf while I'm running then then running is the primary action. The scarf fluttering up and down behind me while I'm running is secondary (it is caused by the running). There is a LOT of this in animation. The gut of a fat man bouncing up and down while he trots along, or the tassel of a hat as a kid runs through the snow, or the hoses of a spacesuit as an astronaut bounds across the moon. But that's for later, right now I have to concentrate on getting the the basics right. So, I'm afraid I have to close here because...I have to run...

Newton Field: ANM 302 - Week 2

Let me reinterate what I said in my first post on ANM 302:  I LOVE PARTICLES!!! So now, we've moved on from emitting particles (which kind of sounds like a social faux pas) to affecting them. This week we're working with Newton Fields. And that's Newton as in Sir Isaac Newton, the guy who discovered gravity. Said fields are named after him due to the fact that they simulate a gravity well using his now famous equation of universal gravitation...and if you don't know it, you should. Anway, the Newton Fields in Maya act on emitted particles like gravity does on us. It pulls them, and when you link the emitter to an object, that object can be made to appear to be the most important think in the universe to those particles which seem to be chasing it. Here are an enormous number of possibilities this opens up, from schools of swimming fish, to flocks of birds, to anything you can think of. Now, of course, I'm going to have to think of something cool to do with this...

Running: ANM 201 - Week 2

Running. What can I say – it's something that we humans take for granted, yet it is an impossibly complex set of actions. Even more complex when you come think of it in terms of animation. You would think it was just a simple extension of the walk cycle: draw the keyframes, figure out the inbetweens, then recycle the drawings. Nope, not quite that easy. First of, it's drawing on “1s,” and that's twice as much work, then to get the best looking run cycle, you need to have certain keyframes be slightly different from each other. That makes recycling images right out, Add to that the lean, the decreased bobble, the decreased emphasis on arm movement and running becomes something completely different than walking. We're going to be video taping ourselves on a treadmill to be reference footage and then animate from there. I think this is going to be an interesting week, because to make a terrible pun: “We're going to hit the ground running.”

Particles: ANM 302 - Week 1

Particles, particles, particles! The fundamental stuff of the universe – or it might be waves. Not quite sure since the quantum physicists in the audience haven't figured that one out yet. But no, I'm talking about particles and their uses in Maya and 3D animation. So far I've learned how to pour a bowl of cereal (pictured above). Perhaps not intensely amazing unto itself, but it is opening up a world of simulations to me, and I REALLY like that. You see, I've been interested in simulations for a long time – ever since I learned what the equation for gravity was and wrote a lunar lander simulation for my Ti55 calculator back in Senior High (here's a hint: that was a VERY long time ago!). Anyway, it reminds me of the other reason I went into animation: scientific simulation. Dynamics, particles, and nparticles in Maya are not so much objects to be animated, but simulators to recreate real world situations. I think this just might be the key to where I want to go in terms of a career in animation. It's definitely something to look at. And on that note, I realize that I'm going to love this class...

Flow: ANM 201 - Week 1

I cannot help but think of the title of a recent movie, “Hustle and Flow,” as I write this blog entry. Simply because I am hustling to get it done, and the subject matter is flow. Flow – what does that mean? Flow is something that's found in graphic design, it's the way elements are arranged by the designer to purposefully lead the viewers eyes through a piece. That, however, is not the flow that I'm talking about. What I mean, in terms of animation, is the way an object moves. Pick up a piece of spaghetti that's soft from boiling and hold one end in your fingers, then gently move it back and forth. See the wiggle?That's flow. It's the sinusoidal movement of an object from an anchored source to a non-anchored end. Things like seaweed, flags, snakes, fish, string and the like move in this manner – it's also the type of animation we're attempting in class this week. In the old days of animation the term, “rubber hose” was coined to describe it. Olive Oyl's (from the Fleischer Studios “Popeye”)arms are a classic example of this. All in all, it seems simple enough, but the simplest things to describe of the most difficult to execute. I'll be posting my example in a couple of days, so stay tuned.

First Post

Yes indeed, this is my first post. I'm tired, overworked, overaged, and cranky - and now I have a blog. This should be interesting...or not. Stay tuned.