Opposing Action

Dave Burgess has done an ECritique for the 11 Second club and provides some interesting insight into the good and not so good bits of Philip Hall's short clip.

One of the ideas I picked up as having use for the flea circus film is that of "Opposing Motion". Loosely based on Newton's 3rd law (To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction) the idea here is that actions look more natural and are clearer if there is an opposing motion to complement them. For example as the character raises their head they also lower their hand. The Flea Circus RingMaster makes these kind of movements with his magnifying glass and tweezers. This is not the same as overlapping action which would be something like hair or floppy ears following a head movement by a few frames and follow through which would be those items keeping moving once the head had stopped.



Dave also has some good points to make about arcs and follow through so I recomend watching the whole of his critique.

Stopmotion Book

There's a new book out by stop motion animation expert Barry Purves. Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance is a great book and if you want to know more about it then you will need to read next month's Imagine Magazine who will be hopefully including my review.

Birds Eye View Events

There's some good events this weekend for animators as part of the Birds Eye View festival that started yesterday.

On Sunday there's a programme of short films and animation, with the UK Premieres of Sally Arthur's A-Z and Lucy Izzard's One of the Family.

A-Z is a blend of Ink on paper and 3D and 2D CGI and Flash, it tells the story of Phyllis Pearsall tackling the monumental task of writing the A-Z. Sally Arthur studied at the RCA and now works for ArthurCox in Bristol.

After winning the New Animator award in 2005 with her film Tea Total, Lucy Izzard was commissioned by BBC Three to make a series of short animations. One of the Family is one of these films and is a humourous look at how pets are treated. This film was also also show as part of the British Animation Awards this year.

Also to be shown is the DepicT! award winning Flighty by Leigh Hodgkinson is a collage style animation previously seen at the Encounters Short Film Festival Bristol.

Also on Sunday is a seminar on Writing for computer games and tomorrow is a seminar on multiplatform films.

Carrara 6.1

It kind of snuck up on me but Daz have brought out a upgrade to Carrara. The main enhancements are for hair, reduced memory requirements for vertex models, some enhancements to displacement mapping and a there's a long list of bug fixes too.

The hair enhancements have new tools for straightening, curling and clumping the hair, there is more control over overlaps and collision detection, symmetry and grouping

The 6.1 version is available to those people who already have 6.0. It's currently a full uninstall / reinstall but there are rumours of a patch version with a smaller download size. You can access it by resetting your download counters in your account.

In related news, Digital Carvers Guild has an enhancement to Anything Goos that allow you to smooth between shading domains.