I can’t believe another full week of Animation Bootcamp is over! This whole course is flying by and I’m sad to see it starting to come to an end. We’ve got one more week of active learning left and then a few weeks of extended critique before it’s all over. Time flies when you’re animating!
Week 7 was all about taking the principles we’ve studied for the past six weeks and bringing them all together in one animation. For our homework assignments we took simple designs and gave them life by incorporating things like anticipation, decay, follow through, secondary animation, timing, spacing and the subtleties of eye tracing and reinforcing movement. As Joey said, Week 7 was all about “adding extra layers of movement to help your primary animation feel good.” And you don’t need to build something super complex to make it feel good either!
“Animation doesn’t have to be super fancy or complex for it to look and feel interesting.”
As I worked through the assignments for this week I found myself falling into old habits and really had to go back and review my notes from the week so that I made sure to add some reinforcing movement to my animations and make sure the movements in my animation weren’t jarring to the eye. Eye tracing is going to be something that I specifically pay attention to going forward in my career. It’s the secret sauce that allows visuals to effectively communicate to a viewer and draw your eye around the screen.
Below is an example of one of the assignments from this week. As always, there is definitely room for improvement, but I’m hoping as we approach our last week of active learning that I can take the feedback from each assignment and everything that I’ve learned from the course to make my final homework assignment feel extra special. One more week to go before our extended critique period so let’s go!
