Josh Santiago Learns the Physics of Animation

This was quite an adventure! We had to replicate four animated walks in live action, trying for an identical replication.

Interactivity and the ability to alter the world around us is a a craving that works as a cornerstone of human existence. The need to feel in control of any situation drives humans. We crave a sense of stability, and the ability to influence a situation. And this is why videogames are so popular. What better way to influence a world than to have complete and total control over a character? There is one game that demonstrates the ability to control a character flawlessly: Super Smash Bros Melee  for the Nintendo Gamecube. Melee is a 2.5d fighting game where the goal is to knock your opponent off the stage. The Smash Brothers world does not adhere to real world physics. It more closely resembles a child's playtime with toys: characters are thrown around, launched, and can "defy gravity" through the child's hand and imagination. The Physics in the world of Super Smash Bros Melee is fundamentally different from our world due to the addition of one omnipresent, supernat...

Physics of smash bros Intro : Super Smash Bros Melee (2001) Basic concept: smash is a 2.5d fighting game where the goal is to knock your opponent off the stage. Instead of a traditional HP bar, smash keeps track of damage through a percentage bar, where the higher the percent, the farther they will go when they get hit. The world of smash bros is similar to ours with the exception of one additional, omnipresent, supernatural force that alters many of the physics of the world: that of the player’s controller. P1: Double jumping and most “recovery moves”: Players have the ability to jump a second time in mid air, usually illustrated through some sort of flip the character will perform, increasing vertical displacement while still in the air, despite the fact that it’s not physically possible P2: Fast falling, L cancelling, and wavedashing: player control over gravity Not only can the player control the height of the jump, but also the speed at which they fa...

This was quite the adventure! I had a few challenges along the way, but I'm quite happy with how it turned out. So I used flipbook studio and my usb webcam to shoot this. I basically did it as a straight ahead animation, posing the figure and then shooting the frame immediately after. The hardest thing was trying to fit in between frames after I had already shot the majority of the motion, since I couldn't necessarily retrace anything, but rather I had to find the exact pose my figure was in and the position the helmet was in. I actually ended up reshooting some of the first shot entirely just to let it flow better.  The other difficulty was in the second drop, where I had my character react as well as having the object fall, effectively having 2 different things to move for those individual frames. I think it turned out pretty well overall, and I had a lot of fun doing it!

The main concept I have is a character leaning on a wall with a helmet on it. They start to lean on The wall, and then knocks the object over. They try to put it back up onto the wall, but the helmet falls again. It's a pretty simple, dorky animation that I think can illustrate character pretty well, while still accomplishing the assignment. My boards look like this: I'm going to use some action figures laying down and use a camera perpendicular to the floor to do the whole scene. That way I don't have to deal with actual gravity, since the whole scene is lying down. Since Iron Man's helmet is pretty heavy, I thought I could reuse some of my (very recent) brick drop video reference to get a sense of weight? But I didn't like how those "felt" so I ended up filming more reference. It was a little hard to shoot, since I'm a pretty tall guy, so it was a little difficult to find a "wall" tall enough. It was also kinda weird ...

This assignment asked us to shoot video reference of an object being thrown up and falling back down. It went fairly well! Here is the image that illustrates the idea of "fourth down at half time," which basically says that when falling, the object spends half of its falling frames in the first fourth of the descent distance, and spends the other half of the frames falling down the rest of the way, because of the acceleration it experiences falling back down.