Saturday, April 2, 2011

Dailymation- Yoni Goodman

Students check this out:

Dailymation

Animator Yoni Goodman writes:

"I decided to do a daily rough exercise in traditional animation, just to loosen the hand a bit and study the weights and motion.
Most of my career as an animator revolved around fast, efficient animations, mainly Flash cutouts.
Some time ago I got sick of the technicality of cutouts & decided to return to the basics of frame by frame drawn animation.   To get my hand back in shape I started doing Dailymations -  short, sketchy, rough & FUN animations, more about mass and movement and less about fine, clean animation. 
Each exercises is done in about one - to - two hours of work (more or less). 
Every now and then I'll post some of my other stuff, but this is mostly about  Dailymations. "

Here is just one example .  Check out the Dailymation blog and comb through the archives to watch what someone can do in an hour or two a day of animating just for the pure joy of it.



Walking Woman - animated by Yoni Goodman
"Done in about an hour-and-a-half." writes Yoni.


A simple rule about animation (as with many other things):  the only way to get good at it is to DO IT.  (A LOT!)    Practice, practice, practice .


A couple of more:


Old Age - animated by Yoni Goodman

"Old woman getting to a chair
Thought i'd try something with a little more weight.
Took about an hour and a half."



Swordfight - animate by Yoni Goodman
"Didn't really plan how this fight would go, I let the characters lead the way. at some points I thought I'd let one guy win, then I countered the attack and let the other take the offensive, so in a way it was a bit like an actual swordfight (only m-u-c-h slower)
eventually no one won, I guess.

Done in about two hours"





Of course, these drawings could be refined more in a subsequent tie-down pass ,  but by working rough like this he gets his initial pass rough animated without investing a whole lot of time .  Once you get something like this roughed-out you have something to work with , you can see it moving , and you can see where you need to tweak it.  Then you're not just guessing about the timing.  The sooner you can get your timing worked out rough in a "scribble pass" like this , then you can spend  additional time refining the drawings and tweaking the timing as needed.