..he's not heavy, he's my puppet

Task 2 -

Stop Motion - Animate a plastercine character bending down, picking up a heavy object and lifting it over their head.

During lecture Number 2, there was another quick test. We created a plastercine biped who had to bend over and lift up a metal screw. It was a good opportunity to alter the way I animated through trying to correct faults that appeared in the previous task. A lot of the models made were top-heavy or had legs too thin to support the upper body - this meant that halfway through the bend to grasp the screw, the model flopped forward wouldn't hold its required position. To counter this, my model had stumpy legs, a squat body and longer arms.

Unfortunately, while this meant it moved and animated well, it wasn't the most attractive of characters. It was encouraging to see that the timing of motion had improved from the 'Bouncing Ball' task but it still had simple faults I wanted to fix for the second attempt at the 'Lifting' task.

'Lift Attempt 1' had the following faults - 

1) Due to the stumpy legs, the range of motion available for the 'bend' was limited - there were no knees and the distance from waist to floor wasn't big enough to show off motion.

2) Energy dissipation - Similar to the ball bounce, at the end of a 'motion' (i.e with the lift, from floor to waist/from waist to over head) energy is implied. This energy has to go somewhere - the usual way for this to be demonstrated in animation is for a smaller 'motion' to be added (i.e a slowing wobble or a small roll after a bounce) This has been missing from both tasks so far.


In the second attempt at the 'Lifting' task, I took in to account both the stability of my model and the human-ness of the less sturdy models and aimed to combine this to end up with a good shaped model that was also easy and stable enough to animate successfully.