Im starting this off by saying, I dont think its is my strongest animation I've done for this assignment. I had a few hours of going back and forth between trying to use rigs, then trying hand-drawn then going back to rigs because I was still learning how I could move rigs properly without them breaking and having to try and piece parts back together in the inbetweens. I spoke to one of my graduate friends who works with rigs in toon boom at her job and she mentioned how most rigs she uses have full master controllers for lots of movement options where as the free rigs I used did not have these which left me with more work to do. In the end I bought the simple blank guy rig off gumroad since I thought using the Olive was going to be too much with the amount of different cut out parts she had.
I couldn't find a solid reference I liked either for this animation so I opted to take my own camera out and film myself. I didnt want to include this as im not comfortable sharing but I can share the other reference I looked at to try and get a better understanding of how someone pushes their weight.
I wanted my anticipation before the push to be one of determination and thoughtfulness. My character does a little head nod to indicate he's thinking about the push and then deciding "Yes, lets give it a go" before pushing his foot forward and pushing himself into the box (which is too heavy to move at all). I wanted to make him try to push it a couple of times to really see if he can do it before reluctantly retreating. I did some little sketches first to get an idea of the lines of actions I wanted my character to have in his poses.
I added my keyframes and breakdowns to the simple push first before animating the anticipation and ending. I wanted to get the strong poses first. You'll see soon that I go from animating the face to removing it entirely as I found it was distracting me from inbetweening properly as the mouth piece kept moving as if it was talking weirdly.
Here I added the start and finishing keyframes of my animation. I hadn't started considering timing at this point which is something I need to work on. I think I need to work out my arcs and timing first in my animations before I do my keyframes because it always messes up my workflow when I finally start inbetweening.
From this point I removed the face and allowed Toon Boom to do the tweening for me. This was a nice start to my push but there was no weight or offsetting to him. It didnt really look like he was struggling, just squeezing himself up against it rather than a push.
After asking for feedback from my friends I went ahead and started changing parts of the poses to see if I could make it really look more like a push. So as he squeezes himself into the box I moved his shoulders up towards his head to really look like theres a lot of force being pushed into the box. I then used the deformers for the head to squeeze his head up against the wall. By doing this I also opened up the option to now push the line of action in his body further.
After a bit more feedback I added even more squash and stretch, pushed him down further and changed the second push to look more impactful by showing his legs sliding backwards before trying to step forward in his push.
Overall im not too happy with this animation and I know theres a lot I could've worked on to make it better. The timing is off and I just couldn't nail down a good sense of weight. Im not sure if its a lack of skill, the rig or more than likely a combination of both. I'm trying not to be too hard on myself even though I have a habit of striving for perfection. I know where I'm going wrong, I can see it. I just know if I had the full month to do the assignment I could've spent a lot more time on it to really perfect the balance of weight. Im eager to hear the feedback for this animation so I know exactly where I went wrong and what steps I could've taken to make it better for my future animations.
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