10 second animation WIP

[Nat]

hey everyone, I'm currently working on an animation for this month's 10 second club contest. For those of you that have never heard of it, you can go to www.10secondclub.net to check it out. The link below takes you to a page that has a single link on it, the link opens the animation. Sorry if you experience errors, it's through yahoo and I've been having some problems with the server. Anyway, hope it works and hope y'all can give me some good feedback. Here's the link:

 

www.geocities.com/nat_iwata/

[Dagooos]

Hi Nat

 

This is looking really good!

 

Maybe you could change it up a little so the hands don't twin as much

 

Just a personal opinion but you may want to tone down the hand gestures a little (its a pretty mellow clip) and concentrate more on the facial stuff.

 

if you changed the camera angle a little you could get some stronger poses

 

especially on that squirrel.

 

Looks like you have some great acting in there. I really like the facial stuff

 

good luck

[ZachBG]

Hi, Nat:

 

The dude is very expressive, especially his eyebrows. Did you model him yourself? Love to see more of him.

 

His sense of weight is off, and I think I know why; through most of the animation he appears to be resting on his elbows. But at the end, he lifts his left elbow off the ground, yet there is no weight shift. His torso should move to (his) right to compensate.

 

The squirrel's movement could be tightened, especially at the end, but most of our attention will be concentrated on the guy, so concentrate on him. He's pretty good already.

 

Nice work, looking forward to more.

 

Zach

[MATrickz]

Very good animation, and characters. I love the squirrel, is his mouth just made of decals? I agree about the sense of weight though, unless he has really strong abs I dont think it looks very realistic

[Nat]

Hey guys, thanks for the the comments, and I'm sorry the site keeps going down. I'm going to repost this with a new link that lets more people see it. Ok, I did model and rig the characters myself, and they're actually kind of old models, but I thought they'd work for this spot. I read what you guys said about the weight shift and actually got down on the ground and went through the motions, and here's what I found: When one is laying in this position, in order to raise one arm off the ground, there really isn't a hugely visible shift in weight. The reason for this is that most of your weight is already distributed onto your lower half and one elbow. I was able to do what my character does with relative ease, and my abs are not very strong. But, animation is about exageration and I agree the weight shift is not quite visible enough to compensate with how it "should" look. So thanks for pointing out something I really hadn't noticed. I also agree that the squirrel could be tightened up but, as Zach pointed out, the attention should be on the other guy through most of it so I won't worry as much about him, but if you have any suggestions on the weight shift of the squirrel when he raises and lowers the binaculars, let me know. Thanks again and hope to hear more!