Posing your characters

During my third term at AM there's really been a lot that I've learned.
One of the things that I can see with new eyes is posing. Posing a character is really important and can make or break your animation. Even if everything is nicely moving, if the poses aren't strong then something will definitely be missing.

By strong poses I mean readable silhouettes and clear lines of action. The character's personality has to be seen in as many poses as possible, if not all. If a character is running because he is scared, you have to pose your character postures so that they clearly show what's happening on that moment.

I remember the work I did for my Hiding Stewie shot. I had lots of comments telling me that the animation was flowing nicely but I could see that something was missing especially in the first 100 frames , and clear and strong poses was one of those missing ingredients.

I hope that my notes make some sense, and to illustrate that , below you can watch my old work compared to the updated version, with clearer poses, and I think that this works better now.

AM class3 Hiding Stewie( old version ) from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

Hiding Stewie ( Updated version ) from Krzysztof Boyoko on Vimeo.

Arcs in animation

It's been a while I haven't touched to my blolg, so here I am. The 11 second club animation contest will end in 3 days and I still have a lot to polish. For those of you who might be interested you can see the work in progress through this link
To come back to the reason I'm writing these notes today, I have to say that as a learning animator, I think that I understand now the true importance of using arcs in your animation. I've been reading it for a while, but I just thought that having my animated arms and legs doing arcs like movements would be enough to get a descent animation..... and of course I couldn t be more wrong!! Unless you want to animate a mechanical gadget EVERYTHING in your animation which is moving should describe arc like trajectories if you want to get a natural and organic feel. That was my advice of the day, here is a quick link talking about those animation principles that are really important for every animator