Jump Up and Down pencil tests
This assignment has it's direct roots in the Descending Energy Ball Bounce shown here:
And while it's similar to the Jump Up & Down asiignment, the forces involved are a bit different.
First of all the character is not just jumping straight up and down, they are pushing themselves forward. This will create an arcing Path of Action as in the Descending Ball Bounce. If you perform this action yourself, you will find that you can only push yourself so high and so far, depending on you physical fitness level, your height, and weight.
The timing theory on both of these is basically the same. You have a slo-in to the top of the action on the way up as gravity begins to fight against the upward movement and then a slo-out as the object or character drops back down.
In this assignment there is also anticipation to the action of jumping up. The difference here is that the character is also jumping forward at the same time and so their landing position will change. In the Jump Up & Down action, the character returns to the original start position "A", creating an endless cycle if you want. In the Broad Jump, the character will advance forward into the "C" position. This requires the character to anticipate both down and back.
The higher or farther your character jumps will require you to create a bigger anticipation. I've mentioned before, that as a general rule (that I've made up for myself) the anticipation should be about 1/4 the size or intensity of the action. Hence, the bigger the action, the bigger the anticipation... unless you want to make it the opposite for comedic purposes: a big anticipation, with a very small action or a small anticipation with a huge action, to surprize the audience. Bob Clampett used to do this in his Warner Bros. cartoons with great effect (watch the very first Tweety cartoon for an example of this).
In some cases, you may want to build up the anticipation with a couple of swings before jumping up and forward. Don't do it more than three times though, again unless it's for comedic purposes.
Here's the idea of having three swings before launching forward.
So now, here are the drawings from my in-class demos.
First there are the rough/cleaned animation keys that I did during the lecture. These took about 1 1/2 hours to complete.
I chose to do only the main primary keys for the anticipation. I'll go back and add in the secondary keys to indicate the rocking action which is the build-up to the jump.
The last 4 in green are still in the rough state that I drew them during the lecture. The blue ones have been cleaned up a bit.
Here are the first few keys overlapped.
Notice how it's the butt that goes up and back, then down again into the anticipation in the purple and red poses shown above, while the head moves down and forward. This could be different, depending on the size and shape of your own character.
Also notice how the head is very close together at the high point creating a bit of a fulcrum point similar to the pendulum swing assignment allowing the pelvis to swing forward.
Once all the primary and secondary keys are completed, I import them into Premier and play around with the timing. Once I've settled on the timing in the pencil test, I can then go back and write in the timing charts on the keys.
Here's the first pencil test.
After watching it a few times, I decided to change the timing slightly to slow parts down a bit. Here's the new timing on the second pencil test.
Play them both a couple of times and see if you can tell the differences. They're pretty subtle.
From this second test I came up with the following timing charts:
The next step is to fill in all the inbetweens and shoot the final pencil test.
The total time spent including roughs, clean-up, inbetweening and shooting pencil tests was 5 1/2 hours.
• 12 primary keys done during in-class demo 1 1/2 hours,
• 7 secondary keys about 30 min,
• clean-up 1 1/2 hours,
• 17 inbetweens took 1 1/2 hours,
• scanning & pencil tests about 30 min.
Here's another example from the Character Animation & Lip Sync book:
This one has a very stiff recovery on the end of it as everything stops at the same time.
Check here for a .pdf of major things to watch out for in this assignment.
Back to the Broad Jump Assignment