In-Depth Post 3

I feel like things have been moving along well so far for my in-depth project. Since I last posted, I have had another meeting with my mentor and Brian, who I am working with for my project. Something that went well during our meeting session was that our mentor, Simon, was very good at teaching us. We jumped into learning the principles of animation, and after that he showed us some videos and books he had about animation. One of the most interesting things that he showed us in a book was some exaggerated classic, cartoon animation cycles. For example, walk, run, jump, shuffle, sneak, and some other cycles that I could base some of my animations off of to make my job a bit easier when I need to make a character do some of those actions.I found this interesting, because it could be useful for myself. Something else that went well was that Brian and I could see a few different items and devices that could help you animate. Our meeting ran well and efficiently, and I believe there was no time wasted.

Brian, Simon, and I communicated mostly over email. When Brian and I had questions, we usually addressed them in the meeting sessions, but a lot of the time we used email, so we would not have to wait all the way until the meeting to have our question answered. The challenge with emailing, especially when trying to schedule the next meeting, was that responses sometimes needed to be waited awhile for. For example, for our last meeting, Brian and I confirmed our meeting quite late, which could have led to some confusions. However, emailing was quite an efficient way to show off our work when we were not face to face, and for Simon do give us some tips, and/or send us videos, so we can learn from his outside of meetings too. Also, for the meeting, we did not specify a time that the meeting would end, which also led to some confusion. Overall, there was not to many challenges with our communication.

Although Simon is a great mentor, we had a few learning challenges, due to lack of being prepared on my part. For example, Simon sometimes emails us videos and such over email, so we can already know lots when we come to our meeting. However, one time I didn’t watch a video, so when Simon was talking about this topic, I was a bit confused. Simon then had to go over the lesson that was in the video he sent us (it was about the principles of animation) because I had not reviewed it ahead of time. This was a learning challenge that was my fault.

So far in my in-depth process, I have learned a lot. From Simon, I learned about the principles of animation. These consist of staging, timing, anticipation, squash and stretch, slow in and slow out, straight ahead and pose to pose, overlapping action, arc, secondary action, exaggeration, appeal, and I think there was another one mentioned either by Simon, or on a website called solid drawing. I also learned about different animation techniques, and other lessons as well. I have drawn a few pictures. I am not very good at drawing, but they are pictures that I was okay with, based off what I was drawing when I first started.

Overall, I am happy with my progress so far, and I hope to start animating next.

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