Conventions of animation - Follow through & overlapping action.

 The task for this week in the conventions of animation module the objective was to gain a better understanding of the animation mechanic known as follow through & overlapping action. Looking through the book "The Alchemy of Animation making an animated film in the modern age by Don Han on pages 100/101". 

It was a quote from Tim Burton " Stop Motion is such a powerful tool you would be lost without it . The reason that I say this is because it enable me to bring my ideas to life, & this is the reason behind my reason for getting into animation in the first place.

From this statement we can determine that without knowing the original methods we cannot hope to create such fabulous animations. Without this knowledge we can not understand how the follow through & overlapping methods occur in animation.

                                          

If we were to analyse the first animation which is a hammer swinging from side to side then what would you say would be the follow through action & what would be the overlapping action?.Some might say that the follow through action in this case scenario is the antenna on the head of the hammer as it swings from side to side continuously.

The follow through action would be the hammer as it moves from one key pose to the next key pose.Once the key poses have been put into place you will notice an overlapping action as the key poses are close to each other in order to replicate the movements of an actual hammer in real life.

                                                

The second animation is essentially the same animation as the animation of the hammer swinging from side to side . However the only difference is that the object has been duplicated over a number of times at each key frame .The hard part was to adjust the key poses each time to create an overall effect of a follow through & overlapping effect. A classic animation example that come to mind is the  scene from the Beauty & the Beast where Belle is invited to the dinner hall & all of the enchanted servants put on a performance to welcome belle.

                                            

         

The last animation is a demonstration of the two principles put into one animation. This animation demonstrates the follow through action at the beginning as it is launched from the diving board to the ground .However the descent from the diving board appears to be without gravity & this may be due to the fact that the animator has failed to research by looking at some video references

Video references give animators a better idea of the weight of a swimmer displays at each stage of their run up to the diving board , jumping to the swimming pool . This may have been the major downfall of this particular task however the animation would appear to be okay as an exaggerated version of a swimming animation as it appears to be over exaggerated at key points.

The overlapping action in the video reference of the comedian Omid Djalili is the movement of his body as he moves from one point on the stage to the next point. For example when he wants to demonstrate a particular emotion he uses his whole body to show how the emotion is displayed. The follow through would be the gradual change from one subject to the next subject.

When Omid Djalili changes from one subject to the next subject he stops moving then introduces the subject which is soon lead by the same routine which is the body distribution from pose to pose showing the joke in a more visual way.