Light is Right!

So here's another fun update! I built myself a lightbox for my animation class and future individual animation studies that I want to work on. I was going to head over to my friends house yesterday to use his computer table which is glass. What is convenient about that is you can put a light underneath it so you can see through your pages (so it resembles an animation light table). However, the only problem with going to his place is that I didn't want to drive half an hour out to Universal Studios which is what he lives by, so instead, I went to target and started figuring out what I would need. I found a really good cheap picture frame, that uses a cardboard backing for 5$. The frame is plastic or something, but it is thick and sturdy so I figured it would be useful since i'm going to be resting my arm on it. The next thing I needed were lights. I found a package for 10$ which had 4 LED lights and they used AAA batteries (which i already had) so i picked that up thinking it would be enough light. However it wasn't and since Target didn't have the right size florescent light, I went to Walmart to buy it for 8$. It works great and I have no complaints. I spent 20$ on something that normally costs about 160$, so anyone interested in building one, this is the better way. I might later on go to home depot and have them cut some thin pieces of wood so I can make a deeper box, but for now, this is excellent. Here are some pics.

This is what it comes out to look like, there is a place on the side where I will need to cut a part of the frame out so it will lay flat, but depending on how soon I get to home depot, I think i can settle for not cutting anything right now. On the very bottom you'll see some tape and a rectangular strip with some pegs coming out. This is what I use to hold my animation paper in place. you'll see further down.

This is what it looks like with 1 page over it, you can obviously see a lot so there's no eyestrain whatsoever, plus I think it looks kind of cool for a crude design = ) I tested it and it can hold over 8 pages that you can see through, which is really good. normally i just work with 2-6 pages depending on what I need to see. When i'm flipping the pages, I don't use the light since it will make it harder to see my movement.

This is one of the things I did in class today. As part of our anticipation project, we are to make a character that's sitting down, stand up. Sounds simple, but it takes some planning, so I drew out some thumbnail sketches to test how I wanted to stand and this seemed to work for me. I will show you the rough and finished results by Friday or Saturday so you can see the animation = ). when it comes to these key poses, you really want to exaggerate the curves because when animation moves fast, you need more time to show that your character has life and dimension. I felt really proud when the teachers told me that I have good artwork. It means a lot coming from professional animators. The arrows on the pic describe my plan of action, and the arrows on his face were just to give me an idea of where I want him to look so I can draw it out better when i'm working on my scene. Friday will be our "Finesse" day which is where i'll get to finish my animation and fine tune my drawings so that they can be the best that I can make them in the 8 hours that we're givin in the day.

Well, that's all for this update, til tomorrow or Friday. I have a physics test tomorrow, so wish me luck!!