• Toon Boom Harmony 
• CelAction2D 
• Adobe After Effects 
• Blender

• Peer Reviewed Articles

• Books by Experts (Both academically and Not academically)

• Official Publications

Midground

• Newspapers

• Bibliographies

• Websites

Unreliable

• Magazines

• Outdated Forums

• Social Media Chat groups

shift m recentres the position of the view

I added elements such as front hair pieces and sleeves to add some secondary animation that I felt would be interesting to integrate into the rig.

This first attempt is clearly very stiff. The rig itself had many flaws, but I was still very excited to see my abilities coming along. I was happy with my inclusion of substitions of the mouth, eyes and eyebrows.

I needed to seperate out the legs and arms for bone deformer implementation and improve the design in several ways. I didn't like how the sleeves looked, the legs looks awkward going into the t-shirt and I wanted to smooth out other facets elements of the design.

This iteration was a big improvement. The overall look and feel of the animation is very solid. I liked this design, but the major issue was the auto patch error that wouldn't allow me to place the arms over the chest without strang clipping. No matter how many attempts I made to fix this I just couldn't figure it out.

I decided the easiest way to solve this issue was to make the next and final iteration lineless.

to reorder drawing subs, select drawing with transform and go to drawing on the top menu and rename drawing

If you want to add prefix such as s for side or f for front, rename drawing with prefix

I created this question as my point of study as a result.

What? > So What? > Now What?

(Describe the situation in context) (What did we learn) (What action to take next based on infromation)

Era Cycle - Jasper (2013)

Experience > Reflect > Action 

(Negative or positive Experience) (How we feel about that Experience) (What to do next using that information)

Atkinson + Murphy - (1993)

Awareness > Describe > Analyse > Evaluate > Identify 

(Understanding of the situation) (Outlining in detail) (Cross-countering previous assumptions) (Deciding if the knowledge obtained is valuable) (Utilise insights for future situations)

Kolb's Model - Kolb (1984)

Concrete Experience > Reflective Observation > Abstract conceptualisation > Active Experimentation

(Start with an experience) (Reflecting and noting new things) (Develop new ideas) (Apply ideas to different situations)

Schön model - Schön (1991)

Reflection in action (At the time the event is happening) 

Reflection on action (After the event) 

Gibb's Reflective cycle - Gibbs (1988)

Description > Feelings > Evaluation > Analysis > Conclusion > Action Plan

(Outline experience) (Focus on Feelings regarding experience) (Was it good or bad) (Make sense of it) (What could have been done to reach a different outcome) (What to do next)

I was keen to add it to my skillset, as although the tools were there at my fingertips, the course didn't touch much upon it at all, and I didn't know where to start.

This module was a good opportunity to get stuck in and make something I could put on my Portfolio and CV to make me stand out.

Introduction (Background) - Talking about the field chosen, gaps in my knowledge, and why I picked it to study

Research Question/Problem - Clear statement of what Research will address and why it is relevant

Objectives - Reasonably achievable goals

Literature Review - Find relevant literature, identify key theories, concepts, studies, etc.

Methodolgy (Research Design) - Specify how I will research this topic and why I've chosen these methods.

My main goals were as follows:

• I wanted to learn Toon Boom Harmony's Rigging Software, and potentially dip my toes into other software if available.

• I wanted to research the Laban Technique and create something that would supplement my work, and further my skills for creating videographic reference for aniamation.

• I wanted to create an artefact: a small 2D rigged animation, inspired by Video Reference made utilising the Laban Technique.

I chose initially chose Gibbs as my reflective Model, as it broke things into many pieces, which I thought I would prefer. However I would go on to change my mind, as in practice, I found myself automatically analysing myself in much more active and simple manner. It felt like a drag and unneccessary to go all the way back over my thoughts to try and adhere to a certain Model, so I refocused onto the Era Cycle, which fit my thought processes a lot more.

2D rigged animation is seemingly a much more recent and untapped field of study, which I suppose makes it interesting to investigate and meant I was contributing to my community as a result, however it made things difficult to find things to reference or find interesting pools of research within the boundaries of 2D rigging as a whole.

On the other hand, Laban and his movements had been discussed in depth by a multitude of sources. I found books in the library and spent multiple hours reading chapters that I felt were most relevant for me and took note of important quotes or information I could use.

Here, I found a treasure trove of information. They have in depth guides on how to create Rigged animation with their software, all in a very helpful step by step guided layout.

I spent many hours going over some of their courses, and following their guide actively, with the software open and using their templates to help me.

Whilst trying to put into Practice what I was learning, I was having difficulty physically portraying and even understanding what to do. I went on a dive online to find someone who was physically giving an example, and pulled up this video.

Bruce Cromer, the man in the video, presented the information in a very engaging manner that I found easy to understand, and was able to replicate myself.

I took some notes on each of the Energies to help remind myself of what they were.

• Glide - Slow, Light, Direct - tai chi

• Float - Slow, Light, Indirect - drunk

• Press - Slow Heavy Direct - slow rising anger, firm slow movement

• Wring - Slow Heavy Indirect overdramatic acting, grandma

• Dab - Fast Light Direct - Focused One track mind

• Flick - Fast Light Indirect - Hurried

• Thrust - Fast Heavy Direct - Focused or even scared anger

• Slash - Fast Heavy Indirect - Panicked, dangerous

It is broken down into 4 different sectors:

• Body

• Effort

• Shape

• Space

My method of research is very active. I find I prefer to put things into action straight away as to "Not break my workflow", and as a result I often forget that with these types of Project I forget to take down my findings in the moment. As a result, I end up with a few confusing notes made in the moment, the final product of my findings (if there was one), and little else.

Although I know in my mind I have advanced my learning, I have little proof as such.

This can be frustrating, as if I slow myself down to take notes, I lose the willpower to work and end up progressing far too slowly to be efficient. But if I continue to research and immediately act upon my learning without stopping to record these processes, I lose out on important evidence, and may lose opportunities to sit and reflect on my work.

Working with my ADHD (which changes the way I work in comparison to neurotypical people) is something I have been trying to tackle since I was diagnosed almost 2 years ago now.

With the medication shortages that occurred this year, I suffered greatly during this project; having to prioritise my group module, as other people were depending on me to complete work.

Facing this, I got an extension, which unfortunately spoiled my overall plan for work I had devised at the beginning of this project.

However, I devised a back up plan to help me complete this project.

In order to balance my way of working, but still get a record of my thinking, I decided to do research in chunks. At the end of each chunk when I had achieved a new level of understanding/ created something new, I would collate the resources I used to help me learn whatever I had focused on. Then, I would write a general summary of the important sections I learned from the research, and use my reflective cycle to analyse the use of it.

All in all it is not particularly chronological, and perhaps I still lose out on some detail, but it was most helpful to as an aid to my learning overall. By creating waypoints of my learning, I still kept my workflow, but also gave me moments to step back and think over my working to solidify my understanding and analyse how it would help me going forward.

The layout has also helped to guide the writing of my Report.

I made an effort to use the Era Cycle when surmising my research chunks, so I could use what I learned going ahead. Where I have done this I have marked them with: (Era Cycle)

I focused more upon this in my final report.

However, I was satisfied with my progress and the scope of my project had been completed. Pushing myself to create more could have lead to me burning out, so I finished up.

I started out the animation by blocking out the main poses of the animation. I was still navigating the feeling of animating with Rigging software so I started with basic pose to pose to understand how everything would pan out.

However this resulted in me being very tentative. I was struggling to integrate my animation principles whilst also working with the new tools. As a result my intial blocking was very meek. It lacked expressive movement.

I decided to scrap this blocking and start again. With more understanding of the rig itself, I was more confident, and knew to push the poses more.

This time the blocking felt a lot more similar to the poses I would create for a traditionally drawn animation. I was trying to integrate LMA but I feel I started to lose out on that understanding around here in the steps of the process.

Using what I'd learnt from my previous attempts, I remade the rig's design from scratch using a lineless style.

I was hoping to transfer the design from my drawing program into ToonBoom directly so I didn't have to retrace the design. I exported it as a psd. and drew the different parts of the rig on seperate layers so I could manipulate them all on their own and set up the rig that way.

However when Importing the design into ToonBoom I experienced some issues with this. The seperate pieces had imported successfully, but when it came to moving, changing their size, or rotating them using the animate tool or tranform tools, their "box" for doing so took the size of the original file instead of the individual piece.

As the rig depends on these pieces being manipulated using these tools in particular, I had to scrap this idea and remake all the pieces in program.

This was rather frustrating, as it meant I had wasted time neating everything up. But it was a learning experience about the way the program worked. It also gave me an opportunity to re-evaluate certain things about my design.

Without the lines the straps of the jumpsuit did not stand out well enough, so I had added a darker accent line around it. In retrospect, this would be difficult to rig, so in the process of remaking the rig's pieces, I made the whole strap this accent colour instead, which I think was a good executive decision.

I also made a similar choice with the front pieces of the hair design, and the little flick on top.

The appropriate configurations are listed above.

I didn't study this one as much as it relates more to do with multiple subjects.

In my project proposal originally I had wanted to create a "5 second animation". After studying Laban I had the idea to do a couple shorter animations of a character waving focusing on the different Efforts.

However, after starting to learn the rigging software I realised it would be a rather substantial workload that wasn't realistic to my level of ability with rigging, and didn't fit my production schedule.

It was a lot more realistic to create one animation of a wave using my understanding of Laban. So that was what I endevoured to do.

It did, which was relieving.

I took mental note of how different it felt from animating traditionally. It was certainly a different skillset, but with many overlapping sectors of knowledge. You just have to apply it differently.

I feel as though this Padlet could be better, but I'm very proud of my essay.

I also have a great animation to put on my portfolio and I can say on my CV that I can rig now!

My research into LMA was very interesting, and really opened my eyes as to how different art forms can still advise animation in a strange way.

I want to do more with rigging in the future. I actually quite enjoyed it. I want to make more complex rigs and understand how they work. Perhaps I can even specialise in it. Who knows.

On rewatch I observed the movements, and there is a distinct style that differs from traditional animation. It is smoother and almost floaty thanks to the automated nature of rigged tweening.

There were no clear answers but I did notice a pattern.

Rigged animation tends to be ine-less, minimise lines, or use coloured lines. I suspect this is because it can hide issues with distortion in the linework.

Screen Recording 2024-07-19 at 3.14.42 PM.mov

was actually too big to export for my little laptop.

As a result, the only attendee to my tutorial session was my classmate Marie Green. Making what I could from such a situation, I pushed forward, and had a one-on-one session with her that lasted a couple hours.

Hearing from her feedback following the session, it seems that the quality of my explanation was sound, and that she gleaned a good foundation of knowledge that will hopefully lead to experimentation in her own time.

If I was to do this again, I would probably have created a more scripted presentation, as I found myself skipping back and forth a bit as I forgot what I had and had not covered. Marie also made the good point that I should have had a physical guide sheet, as it would have helped the session run better, as well as given her something to take home to help retain the knowledge she’d gained. Perhaps I could also record a tutorial video to put online to spread the reach of this knowledge further.