Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Blinks & Eye Darts

We've been practicing eye blinks and eye darts in class recently. The first blink is done traditionaly using light boxes and a program called monkey jam. Very basic, vanilla blinks and eye darts.





This dart was made using adobe flash cs3.


I've learnt alot from these classes. Turns out that people pay more attention to eyes than mouths. Sooo as long as you're showing the emotions through the eyes, your lipsyncing doesn't have to be 100% perfect, because the audience probably won't be paying much attention to the mouth anyway.

Also, we usually learn to draw in arcs when animating movements. When it comes to eyes however, we totally break the rules and try to make the pupils only follow straight lines instead of arcs.

My teacher gave us lots of notes from various animators, one being Kyle Balda, who has noted some very good points:
  • Eye darts generally dart around within 10-20% of the eye
  • Eye dart timing should not be even
  • Eye darts are good for communicating subtle thinking emotion
  • Very fast and poppy (no ease-in to stop) is the most effective
  • Character thinking eye darts should not flow in one direction

3 comments:

  1. Jess it warms my heart to see the product of your learning.

    Hopefully these animation exercises will add to your major project. You now have them in your thoughts as you build your project.

    Thanks for posting your work up.

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  2. haaaalllooo
    Blinks looks alright, but try give the head some movement, the eyes might be the windows to the brain but the soul of the pose is expressed through the body language. And soul is what animations need =). good work, keep it up

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  3. ps, i hope you delete the asian spam, and don't follow their links =)

    ReplyDelete