First Puppet Test!
A Chilling Performance
Week of Nov 13th 2020
It was so funny doing this project because it feels like I see much more puppet animation in media than frame-by-frame animation, yet I had not tried it before this point! Idk that's a strange thing to be weirded out by but the feeling is still there. I watched lots of tv shows growing up that were animated using Flash or some other puppeting method. some of my favorites being Time Warp Trio and Kick Buttkowski (please do not judge lol). Anyway, I actually really enjoyed using this method though, for the most part. I always found it a bit annoying working in the graph editor though, partially because I never was good at math and loathe the thought of parabolas and making those complicated equations to make these squiggly lines??? What's a cosine??? Tangent?? HELLO???? Back to the point, its a bit tedious working with this method because I always feel like I have to do a lot of trial and error to get a moving part to look right when its animated. And then having to match the moving individual parts sync up to look like their moving fluidly? Very hard. As a result, some of the features on my figure move a bit wonky but I honestly don't hate how the final product turned out aside from that!
The most frustrating part of all this though was the inhaling animation I included. After she takes a hit, I distorted the peg that controls the torso up to expand to emulate breathing. However, since she's a bit slouched, the expanding transformation kinda made her look like she was expanding sideways instead of the chest rising. In addition, I'm so frustrated because I COULD NOT get her head and neck to not expand along with her chest peg. When she's inhaling now from the distortion, her skull literally squashes. Talk about drugs turning your brain to mush! I have no experience with pegging in Harmony so finding out where I could've connected or made a new peg in the Node (don't remember if this is the right term?) Editor to prevent this from happening was not possible for me at the time. I have notes from my critique on how to fix it though, so hopefully that works in the future! Overall though, I definitely see the usefulness of this animation method! I even had time to fully flesh out the background and color everything with all the time I had saved not drawing out each individual frame. I want to work in this method more for this time-efficient reason. I saw Toon Boom's Instagram post about 2D rigging the other day as well, so I assume if I decide to give that a go, what I learned doing this project will come in most handy.
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