Avoiding Accumulated Issues in the 'Lifting a Heavy Object' Exercise

When I got to this Lifting a Heavy Object exercise I was very impressed about it because of all the struggling and the feeling of weight we have to convey in this exercise. I was a little nervous about it because I wasn’t sure if I was able to do it. But I had the appropriated support and I knew I had to follow a step by step process, so things started to become less scary and frightening as they seemed to be.

For this exercise I was oriented to follow those steps listed below. Of course, never forgetting to apply the basic principles of animation in each of these steps. All the basic principles I already have learned and practiced so far.

- Choose what kind of “lifting a heavy object” situation you are going to animate

- Find some appropriate references or act it out and record.

- Study your references: watching as many times you need and taking notes.

- Plan your animation: draw thumbnails, make important notes and build your planning sheet.

- Choose the character you are going to use for the assignment.

- Find (or even make/modelling) the objects you are going to need for the exercise.

- Create the Key Poses .

- Add Breakdowns and Inbetweens.

- Do the Polishing (smoothing, adding details and offsetting things).

For each step of the process that I finished, I had to submit it to the teacher. After checking what I had done, he gave me feedback to adjust and improve things that were not good and things that weren’t right. This way I would be able to move to the next step without the issues of the previous step.

So I knew that I had this kind of support from the teacher and I knew I had this step by step process to follow in the Rocket Sky School Course. Both things made me a lot more confident and calm to do the exercise. And it also helped me a lot to avoid accumulated issues or accumulated mistakes.

I learned that avoid this issues or mistakes to become accumulated is extremely important when you want to work as an animator. If you make a small issue or a small mistake in the begging of the process and you don’t fix it, the mistake will accumulate during the other steps of the process. In the end you will have many accumulated issues/mistakes in your final animation that probably are going to make you spend a lot of time and effort to fix everything. Probably you will end up not getting the same quality of your final animation, even being able to adjust everything. And, as a student, your learning will be probably compromised.

You have also to remember that, as a student, you will make mistakes. Your animations are going to have issues to be adjusted. So this step by step process with the appropriated orientations will help you a lot to learn better and faster.

So I followed this step by step process, the teacher gave me the appropriated orientations and feedbacks. This I was able to go adjusting and fixing all the issues and mistakes of my work little by little during all the steps of the process. I didn’t go nuts with lots and complicated changes to do in the end of the process. It really made things way simpler and easier.

I really liked doing this exercise and I got very proud of the final result. Not only because I learned a lot, but also because this step by step process helped me to stay focus on what I needed to, all the time. I believe the learning is much better when you can adjust small issues during all the process than having a lot of issues to adjust all at once. And I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t be able to do it without having the right people guiding me through the entire process. So it really was a great and invaluable learning.