As Of Today, I'm Officially An Animator

Today was a fun day. I submitted my class exercise today on my animation on a flip book. I'm sure some of you did some doodling at the corner of your school excercise books or did a flip book or two back then. Well, that was my class homework and I kinda liked it. I wanted to do my hoola-girl dancing here and there but unfortunately, the paper smears my ink and my wat-supposedly-to-be-damn-cute hoola-girl ended with her hair covering up pratically most of her face. Had to scrap that idea out. Realised can't really do complicated ones. Had to create an easy character to animate it easily. Ended up creating a round alien who found a female alien and kissed her but ended up gotten gobbled up instead. Most of my frens were shocked. They thought it was gonna be a cute animation. Haha!!! Jessica's was kinda funny though. She did this guy got punched real hard till he flew right above the tree... TWICE. Liz did a dancing skeleton. George did a real cool animation. Bo did a smiling pug. Jakk did a jumping birdie (don birds usually fly? Haha... ), Kit did a good job on camera angle and perspective and Daryl's guy got eaten up by an alien. Haha... it's all good fun.

Then today's class exercise was to do a bouncing ball. So Marvy (my lec) explained to us the 12 principles of animation. Oooohhhhhh.... Yup, there are 12 of them to apply in animation. It's not so bad once you understand the basic common sense. For instance, what goes up must come down right? Get it? There you go. Common sense. But there are times where in animation, you can stretch the truth but you must now how and when.

Now, back to the bouncing ball. I had to draw a ball roll off a table and bounced 3 times and out of the screen. Simple right? Well, kinda. To draw that whole action, it took me 30 frames. Some of my buddies did more. Marvy approved my work (Yay!!!) but my ball wasn't consistent though. Wat I mean is that there are some part that looked like a heart-shaped or just not round enough. I thought one or two looked like an onigiri (Boo hooo...). Looks like I gotta practice my circles drawings even more now. Like Cesar said(another lec.. this is not a quote from any Roman dude) "Everything starts with a sphere". Then again with his pronounciation, it sounded like "spear".

Me and George were the first to finish. So we got to shoot it into the pc using DigiCel (a Flipbook animation software). Real cool. Get to watch my first real animation. I was real happy. But you can't make a mistake though. Cos you gotta redraw the frames you screwed up. Yeah. That's why animators gotta draw real fast. But I am happy. To be honest, I've never been happier. ^v^