Due to the recent COVID-19 outbreak, I have not yet had a meeting with my mentor since my previous post, but I have been studying online resources on tips and principles in the world of animation. Since I am not particularly experienced with animation, I have been spending the past few weeks mainly reviewing the twelve principles of animation and different walk cycles. Right now, I’m trying to create a note package for a Youtube video which discusses the 12 principles of animation.

I have currently completed notes for 5/12 of the principles of animation

For the past few weeks I’ve worked on studying different character walk cycles as well. I began by drawing the steps of a standard walk cycle. From there I wanted to draw walk cycles that conveyed a story and expressed emotion, and at that point I found a page from Preston Blair’s Cartoon Animation Book titled the “Movements of two legged figures.” This specific page of the book provided many different walk cycles, each of which made use of posture and body language to convey a message to the reader; the material on the page was exactly what I had been looking for, so I studied many of the walk cycles the page had displayed.I decided to study some of the walk cycles that were shown on the page by attempting to replicate the form and posture as well as I could. I found it fairly difficult to create forms that flow well into each other, this process was a really good learning experience, as it helped me grasp a better understanding of key poses and Inbetweening. After this post I plan to begin actually creating flip book animations and make use of the time I have because of this prolonged break from school.

1. What has been the most difficult mentoring challenge so far? Why?

The most difficult mentoring challenge so far has been meeting with my mentor during the recent COVID-19 outbreak. Because of the virus, meeting with my mentor in person is out of the question, so our only solutions are to stay in contact through email and hold online meetings with each other. I’m planning on emailing Ben and Simon soon to organize an online meeting on a platform such as Zoom.

2. What is working well? Why?

Something that is working well currently is going back to the basics of animation. After the studying and research that I had completed over the past few weeks I’ve started to realize that there are many concepts in animation that I am not remotely familiar with, so the notes that I took are a really good summarization of the learning I have done so far, and they’ve provided me with a sturdier foundation for the concepts that I’ll learn in the near future. I hope to begin animating after this post, and I hope to make good use of the time I have because of our prolonged “break.”

3. What could be working better? How can you make sure this happens?

Right now I am struggling with motivating myself to work on my In-depth project. Since our break has been prolonged I have more than enough time every day to work on my In-depth, I don’t have to worry about the time I spend on public transportation between my home and Gleneagle. I’m currently worried that I’ll push off my project because of how much time I now have, so, in order to counteract this issue I’m going to schedule a block of time each day specifically to work on my In-depth project over the break.

More to come – Brian Cheng