After a week of pretty much relearning Flash and trying to rememeber all the animation principals I learnt last year, I have finally finished my man lifting a weight. Here is the 3rd try rough edit -


Untitled from Insa Burch on Vimeo.


...as you can see its pretty rubbish. I still have work to do on the timing and I need to make it neater. I spent a week designing a character and I tried so hard to make sure the drawings looked the same as the character that I got the timing all wrong. I ended up starting over twice after a chat with Andy who told me to let go of the character business and concentrate on simple shapes that represent a person. He also said to watch the reference video and instead of drawing only the key poses to just draw the flow of the movement and forget about everything else. So after 4 hours of trying to make the original look good and work, I scrapped it and started fresh with just blue sketches (much the same as doing it manually on a lightbox) which led me to the video above. After that I went through and sorted the timing out (as I had literally done one drawing per frame) and then today I went through frame by frame and cleaned it all up and made sure the figure wasn't shrinking like it had been in the first vid. Anyway, enough waffle...here is the finished thing...


Weight Lift from Insa Burch on Vimeo.


Still have a bit of work to do on it though...

For this week's task Derek has asked us to animate a walk (not a walk cycle) and I am going to do a Gangsta lean. I will try and find video on youtube...

Chow!