Heavy Work

To make a character interesting and believable you have to give them some weight. So the impending exercise for week 4, was to develop a basic human character and animate it doing two actions. The choice was between pushing, pulling or lifting heavy or forceful objects. Here we had to not only think about successful character design...considering complexity, the graphic nature of the character, silhouette, weight and balance, but we also had to revising our old friends 'timing and anticipation'.

So with our acting skills (or whatever semblance we had of these) and video camera in hand we acted out and filmed eachother, pushing, pulling and lifting. This exercise not only served as a good way of documenting the movement, but was a way to get us to experience the action ourselves and transfer this kinesthetically onto paper.

When I first embarked on the task, I designed a fairly complicated life-like character, which meant that my movement had to be particularly life-like to ensure believability. I'm quite happy with the result, and think that I can certainly sense a real weight in the character's action. If I had more time I would have liked to have added a few additional drawings in the recoil at the end of lift to slow the jerking movement. Upon further viewing, I would revisit the path of the ball and perhaps have it leading the movement a bit more.

With so much time invested in the first animation...my fault for making a complicated character! It left me little time for the pull. This animation involves a very basic mannequin and is unfinished, but still managed to capture a forceful pull.