Animation, and Why I Will Never be a Hair Stylist

Well I realized how long had been since I last updated this blog, and decided I should get to it. That was two weeks ago. I've kind of been putting it off for a while now. The reason? Well the progress I've made hasn't been quite to my standards. I've been mostly working on giving life to my characters(s) through animation, and giving my one female character the "stylish shoulder length hair that is a color somewhere in between orange and brown" that the script calls for. I can tell you that it was much easier to type that innocent little line of text than it is to actually create the hair. When creating computer generated hair, you have precise control over every strand on the head. You'd think this would make it easier, and in a way it does. But in real life, no matter how bad someone's hair looks, it still looks like hair. In computer animation, bad hair can look like a blob of something sitting on you characters head that in no way resembles anything close to hair, even when you stand ten feet away and squint your eyes. It's really rather frustrating. But needless to say, I now have much more respect for hair stylists than I have ever had before.

So when I haven't been impersonating a hair stylist, I've been practicing animation. I can tell you, it's some pretty tough stuff. You have to look at it like your an actor. You have the same tools actors do, timing, body language and such. But I would argue that animating is many times more complex than acting. Actually I would go so far as to say that an animator is the ultimate actor, the über-actor. The animator is not just one character on a stage, he is all the characters, at the same time. Every movement that is seen must have been put their intentionally by the animator. All the little things a stage actor does with out thinking to enhance his performance must be fully understood by the animator. Nothing can be done by "feel." Where an actor is required to "stroll casually," he does it by feel. No one has to tell him how to stroll. But an animator must fully understand the every nuance of motion in a stroll, from the timing of the arm swinging to the bounce that might be seen subtly in the feet. So thats what I'm working on. Both the understanding of motion and recreation of motion.

This is one of the walk-cycles I've animated for practice. I'm hardly happy with it, his body jerks back with every step as if he is being hit by some force, and his legs snap forward as he walks. So I really wasn't going to post it, but then I remembered that this blog was about my progress, not my best work:)