Beginner,intermediate & expert ? [Archive]

View Full Version : Beginner,intermediate & expert ?

theplayhead

08-12-2005, 02:38 AM

i had a question in my mind for a longtime . i understood that
animation starts from a basic ball bounce and continues upto excelent
acting. the q i had is " Can animator be classified according to his skill level " ?. that is showing emotion , personality , acting is the ultimate goal of any animation and if acting is an EXPERT stage of animation , what would a BEGINNER and a INTERMEDIATE has to know. 
 
pls list them if you have any idea about it.

d_jnaneswar

14-12-2005, 09:12 AM

Beginner should be knowing basics of key frames, break downs and inbetweens, basic knowledge about principles and their application and an eye for poses... for these guys, after working really hard, their animations look acceptable.. and a copule of principles are applied well, altho many of the others are goofed up.. these guys need to think about every thing at every stage and they are usually confused....
Intermediate would be doing the same things listed above with better application of principles but their characters dont yet come alive.. except occassionaly.... To these guys, their work needs just that extra to make it look awsome.. they have to strive to get the principles into their work... but they atleast know where they fall and they try not to... with the guidance of experts, they can pull off great shorts pretty quickly... these constitute most of the people.. the intermediate is a wide range of people, usually consisting of feature animators and high end game animators, to top quality students... The elite of this group are animators in places like Pixar and blue sky and ILM.. people like Rick O Conor, bobby beck, Shawn kelly, and the best here, would blur the line between intermediate and expert... this range covers the starting feature animators and junior animators to senior Game animators and feature animators... The blur between intermediate and expert is filled up by people like the Animation Supervisors or Character supervisors in the big studios... 
Expert is some one the stature of Eric Goldberg or Glen Keane, where they dont *think* about principles at all.. they have them coming naturally, and all they think of  is the performance of the character...these guys struggle with stuff like acting choices, character portrayal and stuff..
 
This is not a great way to categorize but, Im pretty happy with it.. im still a beginner at this.. and hope to work another 2 to 3 years to reach the beginner intermediate stage.. no one knows when you become an expert, it suddenly happens and every one notices... there are just a handful of experts..
Now, lets work our asses off to get out of the stinkin beginner stage...
dj

theplayhead

19-01-2006, 10:00 PM

thanx a lot dj.. sorry for late reply anyway thank you once again for giving us a beautiful description about the skill levels ...  
i ve been wondering all these days about this , now i have the answers , and from now on i am going to be still more conscious in working with my animations ..
I wanted to ask you about one morething ie. How long should a Beginner working with the ball animations.. 1 week , 2 weeks or a month !!  or I ll reframe my Question , What are all the principles can be understood by the ball bounces and usually how long would it take?
thnx,bye,
theplayhead.

d_jnaneswar

25-01-2006, 10:32 PM

I have been doing bouncing balls for a long time now (4 years).. and every time i do them, ive learnt something new.. and every time i redid it, i hated the last one that i did.
Its more like something u keep going back to, after doing some other stuff.. and you would do it better every time. but eventually, you will end up with a "workflow" and thats when the learning from bouncing ball starts to slow down.
 
hope that helps.. my suggession would be to start with bouncing balls, do them for a couple of weeks, try different weights.. practise doing it manually frame by frame with "stepped" mode on for the keys to learn spacing and timing... rather than using the Graph editor. then start doing jumps, walks, runs, and then go back to balls.. Also do some pendullums, do some dialogue.. u know.. its all about having fun!
The most important thing is to learn from every shot u do. Once u like the result, go back and see how many frames it took for some thing and register it in ur head.. pretty soon, when ever u see something live... u would say.. "aha! thats a bit slower than the normal walk, but faster than the run! so its about 8 to 9 frames!" kind of a sense of timing.. Then ur work would start to shine.
Along with practising with bouncing balls, start practising posing a lot.. look at head tilts, hip and shoulder angles, weight, balance, mood, spine curvature, action lines and feet placement and direction, and knees and Most importantly HAND gestures! keep drawing them.. do like 20 different poses a day.. small simple sketches.
 
Hope this is helpful mate! altho.. not that im an expert at this.. this is the stuff I learnt from the top animators of the world.. and im only happy to share.
dj