In all honesty I’d been avoiding doing the puppet animation sessions for a while, simply because I didn’t want to miss out on anything important on the Monday classes, and I didn’t really think I’d enjoy puppet animation as much. However I was very surprised at how fun it actually was!
Initially it took me a while to get my head around the dragonframe software and it was a lot of information thrown at us very quickly, but once we were able to actually start using it, it was a lot easier to pick up that I expected.
I had time to make 3 different attempts. After my first attempt I realised how much easier it is to get the timing more accurate as you’re not worried about the quality of the drawing or anything like that. I think this exercise really helped my understand more about timing and exaggeration in animation.
After some feedback from both Anita and Steve on my first and second attempt, I tried to add even more exaggeration to my third attempt. The only thing I think I struggled with was where the puppet is trying to lift the ball but its suddenly to heavy, I was trying to exxagerate that point and bring the ball the swing between the knees more, but I couldn’t seem to fit the arms and legs between the knees so therefore if you look too closely it looks a little weird!
Overall it was a really surprisingly fun experience and I definitely wont hesitate to try puppet animation again in the future.