One of the keys to being an effective animator is being a good observer of movement. You will practice that skill in this assignment by observing three different people performing the same task. Pick a task that you can watch three different people perform (e.g. pushing a shopping cart, making a pizza, playing a game). It should be something simple so that you can focus on the details of the movement and ideally something that you can view them doing multiple times as you may not get all the details on the first pass. Complete detailed observations of how each person performs the movement. Be concrete and talk about what the person is actually doing. Do not say things like “the person seemed angry” but rather “the person moved the cart with a series of short, rapid shoves. His arms and torso were stiff…” Try to describe the movement in enough detail that someone could animate it only having read your description. Make use of the LMA terminology we have been learning as much as possible. The LMA framework will also help guide you in terms of qualities you can look for in the movement, e.g. Do I get a hit of Time Effort from how the person is moving? Once you have completed each observation, also answer the following questions: If you wanted to caricature the person’s movement, what details would you emphasize? What details would you eliminate? What are the key aspects of his/her signature?
Specific grading criteria:
- Quality and detail of the observations
- Clarity of the writeup
- Quality of the caricature analysis
What to submit:
- A single document with your description of each of the three different movers and the answers to the questions above.
- The preferred format for your submission is a pdf, but Word (.doc/.docx) or RTF files are also acceptable.
The basic submission procedure is the same as for all assignments.
- N.B. Name your document “A3YourName”, where “YourName” is your first and last name. This is how we will identify your submission.
- Submit by following the instructions below. If you need to update the submission, just copy another folder and update your name with v2, v3, etc. We will only mark the last submission.
1. The "classes" folder should be automatically mounted. If it isn't, there should be a link on your desktop that you can double click on to mount the folders. The link is called “tcsserver.ucdavis.edu/Classes”.
2. In the classes folder, open"TCS 131".
3. Drag and drop your assignment into the "Submissions" folder. Make sure
it is named correctly, as described above.
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