Week 5 & 6 - Overlapping Action, Anticipation, Squash & Stretch

Little late on the update. Week 5 was all about overlapping action. The principle that nothing ever really starts and stops moving at the same time. Everything moves in a layered approach. There's some what of a family of principles within the concept of overlapping. It depends on the object moving, but generally you'll have follow through, a successive breaking of joints, drag and wave action. You can witness these in almost anything, from a blade of grass blowing in the wind to a baseball pitch.

We had to encompass this in jointed pendulum attached to a moving platform. Here's the final result:


Pendulum Revision from Aaron Skinner on Vimeo.

Week 6 focused on Anticipation and using squash & stretch to convey it. Anticipation can be summed up as the 'action before the action'. E.g: The 'wind up' before a throw or a punch being the anticipation (or secondary action) - the actual resulting throw/punch being the primary action. The 'Tailor' character is basically a bouncy ball with a squirrel tail attached to it and we had to channel everything we've learnt so far into this assignment. Here is the first submission:


TailorFirst from Aaron Skinner on Vimeo.

It's far from perfect (and whilst writing this I actually received the mentors critique). The main issue is how he curls up half way as he looks down at the drop. I thought it would be neat to have his body AND his tail kind of looking at the gap, hence why his tail points. It was a bit of an impromptu but failed experiment, as Ray had no idea what that was about. Note to self: Keep It Simple Stupid. Other issues include: holding his anticipations for too long (so he ends up frozen in a squashed position) and his tail not arcing/curling correctly in some areas. So over the next few days i'll be tweaking Tailor a whole bunch.