Ducking and Diving

Aside from the third year films I'm working on I've also been animating a small piece of character movement to improve my anticipation, overlap and making my animations smoother.
In the past I've found some of my line work jitters because I don't clean my key frames up enough so when I come to put the in-betweens in I don't know where the true line is.
This time I have gone through the process of mapping out the rough key frames and tidying them up then putting rough in-betweens in and cleaning them up.

This short piece of movement actually originated from an anime I had been watching called 'Hyouka,' and I felt interested to know what this movement would look like if I animated it in 25fps instead of the Japanese 8fps which 'Hyouka' follows. The only aspects I took from the clip were the basic shapes for the key frames (rough keys from the video above). I then fleshed out the keys myself and added the rest of the movement without looking at the original. Going back and comparing my finished piece to the original now is astonishing in terms of how limited the Japanese movement is and the lack of anticipation and overlap compared to mine. It goes to show that if the Japanese had the budget, fluid movement such as this could be achieved.



Original clip

 

 

 

 

Comparison