Waving Flag Trial 7
Yea... a lot of trials happened between my last flag post and this one... obviously. There's really no need to show all of them. It'd just be boring. I was in the lab today for 7 hours. From around 4pm to 11pm. I am tired and I am finally eating dinner. (Thankfully I did get to snack on some udon earlier). I was really determined to not go home until I finished the whole thing. I felt like this last one would be IT. As I watched it, I felt a little disappointed. The animation looked way better and I did manage to fix the parts that I wanted, but the ending still kind of moved weird and I was getting this baguette shape in my flag that I thought I had fixed, but I guess not. I redrew so many frames going to the trouble of cleaning them all up. However, I still see that wiggly line at the top where I was trying to be fancy with the crease.
So I think I may have to shoot this again tomrrow. T_T
This little line is the perfect representation of where my mind is STILL at when it comes to animation. What I mean by this, is that I came to the realization starting this class of how many really bad habits I had formed over the years when learning to animate. I wasn't exactly taught in a very formal or restrictive way. I had free range. Sounds nice and fun, but in the end it kind of ends up just causing you trouble later. I've been a careless animator. I've thought winging it and making it up with a very rough plan sketched out in my head was good enough. Surprise! It's not. And even though this just sounds like a bad idea and seems so obvious to me now, at the time, it was just a "pssh. it's fine," thing. It looked good enough. This animation passed. You could tell what was happening. But that doesn't make beautiful, fluid, professional animation now does it. You can't just guess. You need to know everything. Even details that don't even seem relevant. What is this character's background, their motivations, their personality?
You need a plan. You need to sketch it out first. You can't just start animating and see what happens. I've cut too many corners and this habit needs to end. I need to start making every line have a purpose.
I feel like I kept putting that crease there and just hoping it would work. It kind of got lost in the lines so even when I tried to stay consistent, I ended up just guessing where it should go. Bad, bad, bad.
Another lesson learned. Another bad habit exposed.
