06/03/13 - Line of action 2

 As well as the silhouette method and criticism from peers and lecturers. I've also been using another method to help with my iterations. I want the animations i produce to be the best i can make them so i'm pulling out all the stops.

A couple of posts ago i mentioned line of action being used a lot to help with poses in 2D animation. So I've been applying this to my own work based on the idea you probably will only see this performance from a specific angle anyway.

I took the animation i'm working on at the moment, Extreme Flight (or number 7 on my scale), made screen captures of the key poses that I've blocked out and then drew in the lines of action of the main body and the arms. I then move the red lines so they were on their own and i could see their flow more clearly and got this.

Immediately you can see that number 4 has something odd going on with it. The main body bends in the wrong direction and the arm  angle looks wrong and pretty much impossible. The character's left arm in 4, 6 and 7 also are odd and don't help point towards the line of action either and the first few don't lean away from the threat enough. Highlighting that they need to be more exaggerated.

So using this i went back and fixed the aspects id noticed. Paying more attention to the poses and the line of action. Did the same thing again and got this.

Much better. It's easy to tell from these that the character crumples away from the threat and then begins to straighten out again into a fast run in the last frame.


Just for an added bonus you can have the picture with the screenshots left in. The layout didn't really go to plan.