Moho Animation Forum

hmm...

this is kinda a subjective post but meh

I feel like to a certain extent- I'm getting better animating, but yet I kind of feel like I'm spinning my wheels.

I say this because I am becoming more confident that I can figure out how to animate a particular thing in my head (although nowhere near perfect ofcourse and it's not always exactly the way I'd like) I also feel like I'm sort of at a wall.

The wall being my animations are very...POW! Like they don't have the visual kick to the face? Its kind of hard to say.

I mean, my style isn't very exaggerated- mostly because I just don't like that style. I also don't use bones or things like that just because I don't like the look sometimes

I think what it comes to is- my animation is not polished, but the thing is- I don't know how to polish it!

hmm

also if anybody has any links to just "painting" in AS i'd be appreciative

I know that feeling - and I still get it after 30 yrs of animating.

What can I recommend?
Drawing skills:
- Get out more often. Out of your one and only animation software, that is. Get out and use different tools, the more variety, the better.
- Do more live sketching, wherever you are: in the train, in the mall, everywhere where you can observe people.
- Use anything which makes a line on paper: pencil, ballpen, brush, a stick dipped in coffee.
- Change formats: use a small sketch pad outside, use some large sketch pad at home, of just get a roll of cheap wrapping paper, then use your biggest brush.
- Do at least one drawing every day. It doesn't need to be finished or perfect, it just needs to keep your concentration on drawing for at least some minutes.

Animation skills:
- Do some stop motion. Use everyday objects, toothbrush as hand, scissors as legs, some asymmetric object as head, whatever. Try to express something with this.
- Tangram. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangram) I played around a lot with this when I was a child, especially constructing human characters from these abstract shapes. I think I learned a lot about how a head tilt expresses a certain emotion from that. You don't need to use this, it's just easy to create by yourself.
- Puppetry. A sock puppet will suffice. Just let it walk and talk and do whatever, but watch it closely to see how it works. This can teach you a lot about poses and timing.
- Be playful. Look at everything on yout table and imagine how it could be transferred into a character. After all, "animation" means "bring to life".

I kind of see what you mean. Try taking a scene from your favorite animated movie and compare it to yours. What does it have that you really like that yours doesn't and see how you can incorparate them into your scene. Experiment with camera angles that you haven't tried yet. Use different simulated lighting effects like flickering torch lights and deep shadows or colored filters. Comic books would be a good source as would some of the older B&W movies. If you've tried some or all of these things, do like slowtiger suggests and get out and look for inspiration wherever you can. If you can't sketch at some of these spots you find, use a camera to save for later sketching, this would also allow you to get a lot of different angles of a subject. Try youtube, it doesn't have to be AS for some of the techs you find there to help give you ideas. I watched a good vid on there a little while ago on speed painting in manga studio that gave me some ideas. Also try playing with some of the different layer blending modes in AS, doing that has inspired me to some cool effects. Sorry if I stated the obvious and isn't what you were looking for.

Thanks alot guys-

I'll use these suggestions

I think I need- more inspiration