Successive Breaking of Joints Project

Successive Breaking of Joints from Tien Nguyen on Vimeo.

In this project, I was assigned to create an animation that shows the successive breaking of joints, by animating an arm slamming down on a table, hammering a nail, ringing a doorbell, or pitching a ball.  I decided to animate the ball pitch.  I had to at least show the arm and show flexibility in the motions.

The new required Principle of Animation for this project was:

1. Successive Breaking of Joints

The optional Principle I used was adding an upper body to the character.

Definition
-Successive Breaking of Joints: Refers to rotating joints in the opposite direction to its normal bending. In the real world this wouldn’t be physically possible without actually breaking a joint.  In animation bending the joints in the opposite direction will add a lot of flexibility to a movement.  (In my own words: Bending joints that in real life would break to show the flexibility of a character.)

(https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOK6B-8ilddNNDjKStNO0gBvE5045HYi2dWIabTE7qBxtHpk5NYZFf50bUYLhV92bGo_AouRn6z-_nW3n8beTNzFopOCqi0m0DImifOg_8ANHKAfjNsaGTzZINxyTAxmHc70190qNZsec/s1600/S_B_of_Joints.png)

There were many challenges to this project.  I first approached this by finding reference videos of a a ball pitch on YouTube.  Here was my video that used to reference so I can exaggerate the motions of my character.  With previous projects, I would start animating pose to pose but with this project I started animating straight ahead (and then I went back to pose to pose when I needed to add more inbetweens).  The reason for this was because it was difficult for me to visualize how this would look because this was nothing like I had done before.  I also ended up adding a lot more body parts than I had anticipated.  So that meant I had to pay attention to ever single arc as the body was moving.  But in the end I'm glad that I challenged myself by putting the upper body and I am proud of myself because I think the results were mostly successful.