The Four Second Club

Token doodle made earlier:


On Thursday night we had an Animation and Discussion session, it was a good turnout and an interesting discussion. It was good to see the stuff the other animators have worked on and give some feedback.

I got lots of feedback on my Anim which I've typed up below. I'll be implementing this feedback, performing another polish pass and then evaluating the animation. Make a render and probably move on. I feel like im going as far as I can with it and would like to take the lessons learnt and benefit from them.

*Shot 01 is too even in timing, it should have more texture
*The lean back when the doctor starts examining the weevil should have less even timing
*When the captain thumps the table the hand should clearly be in the previous shot or *the hand should not be in the scene at all.
*When the captain wipes his eye the right hand should be more fluid.
*The captains eyebrows should raise up on the word “dished!” …and hold.
*When the doctor sniffs there should be counter action on his body.
*The doctor is too out of frame on “length and breadth” the composition should be more like the previous shot
*The captains hand does not read well on “in the service” perhaps remove and focus on the captains face.
*The captain should only make one or two scratches on “one must choose the lesser” to focus the attention on the captains face.

The four second club

During the session we talked about the 100 frame animation challenges that are seen on http://spungella.blogspot.com/

The challenge is to make the best animation possible that is no longer than 100 frames around a specific theme.
One theme used was "Guilty" you can see the results here. Entry number 12 won.
http://spungella.blogspot.com/2010/05/spungella-anim-contest-voting.html

We all really like this approach as it takes a bit of spare time and some passion. The results been inspiring. However in games we animate at 30fps instead of films 24fps. So that we don't lose those valuable frames we've decided to do the same challenge ourselves but with four seconds worth of animation instead. The four second club.

After a bit of discussion we narrowed it down to three themes for our first animation.
"Hunted", "betrayed" and "boobs". Ok, the last one was a joke, but I could work with that.

With a flip of a coin "Hunted" became the first theme for our four second club. I'm pretty pumped about it and looking forward to getting some ideas down. Im aiming to get some rough keys together for the next Animation session in two weeks time.