Here’re the results of a stop motion tryout session, working on a lift and push exercise.
I had never worked with an armature before and it felt both interesting and challenging at the same time. I was initially having issues with the stiffness of the arms, and when I got to loose them a bit, they became really unstable.
I gave the push exercise a couple of tries and I was impressed to find that the timing was not too off. I would have probably wished to fix the end step, but the fact that the armature’s arms where really stiff at this point helped me convey the weight of the ball (hopefully!).
It’s another story with the push exercise. Here I struggled a lot with the hands and arms not staying in position, so I felt extremely limited when trying to convey the movement. I think I started shooting at least three times before swapping puppet with my classmate, as his had stiffer arms but weaker leg joints. Still, the puppet was falling half way through so I just decided to embrace it and made the character fall in a very dramatic way.
The overall experience was both frustrating and rewarding: I found myself thinking more about the actual movement compared to when working on a 2D software, and I was acting out the movement more to understand the key poses.