More Straight Ahead Animation

Sack Hop Race Animation from Matt Long on Vimeo.

Here's what I've done recently. As you can see these two have a bit more personality than the last ones and are breaking away from their patterns a bit. It helps add a lot of life and interest when you break the cycles, which is something Mike has been trying to get me to break away from. I have a tendency of finding something that works and sticking with it, and it gets repetitious and boring, so that's my next step in this journey.

One of the things I've noticed is I'm getting much looser with my drawings and speeding up quite a bit but am still able to maintain and even increase the quality of animation. I think because of this I'm able to keep my thoughts and feelings within the first pass more than before where I'd get new ideas mid way through and start losing the essence of the animation. With the first boy I wanted him to think he can get ahead with a larger bounding leap only to find it takes time to recover from and ultimately doesn't pay off. The 2nd boy I wanted him to lose his hold on the bag and then regain it while for the most part maintaining much of his momentum. Hopefully it comes across clearly.

So that's all for now, also if you didn't know Vimeo lets you download the original video file (you may need to register) if you want to frame-by-frame any of these recent animations. I like it much better than Youtube for that.