Monday, April 15, 2013

Walking Dude animation.

That's what he is. I wanted to see if I could animate a dude walking (in Flash), and I did it. I learned a little bit when I did it. Of course it's not perfect, but when you're using inverse kinematics it's not exactly an exact science (at least it isn't for me yet). I took about a half hour and put this thing together (drawing it in Illustrator, setting it up in Flash, and animating). This is something I want to do a little bit more of in the future. I really like animation and it's something that I wanted to do when I was little. Kind of a dumb story but I decided not to go after it when I was a sophomore in my High School careers class. We looked up the salaries for the jobs we wanted to do and animators were like in the lower echelons of pay scale (like $10 an hour, it really sucked) and that changed my career path to, well nothing at the time.  But it wasn't animation which is sad because I really wanted to do it. I spent most of my younger years drawing all the disney characters, and, like any talent if you don't use it, I lost it, or at least most of it. I can still kind of do it. 

Anyway, the animation was just kind of an experiment, but I can do a lot of other things as well. Making someone walk is pretty difficult (well to make it look natural is difficult).  Since my focus before has been on photography, it's been a real learning curve working in graphic design (Oh I don't know if I said this before, but I am freelancing as a graphic artist). I mean I know all the principles and how they apply, and also all the software, but actually putting it into practice is something else completely. I have a huge respect for the full time graphic artists. It's hard work.

Here's another one I did. Most of these were done as examples for lectures in my classes, but it helps the students get the idea of what they are supposed to do.



The above video was just a quick one I did (in Flash) for Stevens-Henager College just to put on their video displays. We needed some recruiting videos for the graphic arts programs (everyone was going into medical specialties) so we made this one and it worked, the program grew.