Unit 12 Character Animation
This was a class exercise where we learned the basics of key posing which is the most curial aspect in animation.
we tried to capture 3 different emotions, despair, anger and happiness, In my poses I focused on the line of action, this is the a line you should be able to draw down the whole bosses which shows the direction and flow of the characters body position and posture.
In animation you want to have a combination of strong key poses, contrasting lines of action between your key poses, snappy transitions between key poses. These aspects are the foundation to good animation.
I think the key pose for despair emotions works well as it a has a distinctive pose and expression.
The reason why I think it works I used a real life reference image and interpreted to make my pose, the other emotion could have been improved, things like the anger emotion did not have a good line of action and the pose for happiness is really portraying the emotion I want, I could used more reference images to improve these poses
I have researched different professional animations, trying to find out what techniques they use to bring there characters to life, I have found that Disney Pixar's animation is at the forefront of professional animation, By watching the monsters Inc and toy story. trailer, I have found some techniques they have used, I could implement them into my own animation.
The first technique ( animation rule) is the most essential, which is to have strong key poses these are the main aspect and what make up the animation in professional workflows the animators first work on getting the key poses correct and the work on the in-betweens. The second is to have a strong line of action, this give a scene of the direction and position your character is in, the last aspects is the contrast between the key poses, this adds snappy eccentric movement which helps bring the character to life.
I have looked at animations from two tv shows, Pocoyo and Noddy. I have chosen these two for research because one the shows examples of good animation techniques and one shows bad. These two are on the other end of the spectrum in terms of animation. Pocoyo has very snappy animation where it looks like most to all frames, are key poses it maybe a bit extreme but its bring the characters to life, and noddy's animation is very slow and dragged out, Noddy's animation looks like its about 30 percent of key frames and the rest is in-betweens, this makes it looks very dull and lifeless.
In this exercise we started to create basic animation, starting of with the head turn. This animation can be broken down into 3 different parts. The first is the actual head movement, what I focused on was the getting that anticipation movement in the movement in order to add more life into the animation. The second aspect is the eyes moving, I focused on getting the eye to lead the head and dart toward the area the character is turning, this adds realistic eye movement to the character, the last is the blink animation this pulls every thing together and stops it from looking so robotic. I could of improved on different aspect like the timing of the head turn.
The next exercise was to animate a shift weight, shift weights are used to add life to someone who is standing for a long time, in real life people constantly shift weights to stand in a more comfortable positions.
In animation we can use this a way to add more movement to a standing character, it also stops character looking like lifeless statue's when their standing, the first aspect of a shit weight is the movement starts from the hips, This simulates how people would normally move from one shift weight to another the next aspect is the what leg is the character putting his/her weight on, I focused on this to make sure to key poses looked believable.
In this project the goal was to create a 11 second animation which is acting out scene from a sound clip
Research I have conducted were on different animations like monster inc and toy story. I found different techniques used by these the animators I that I could implement in my own animation, I also was able to and compare different styles of animation such as pocio and Noddy and see the difference in quality of the animations.
In class I did difference exercises which aided me in understanding some of the basic rules of animation, some of these rules include, strong key poses, line of action, and leading moving with the eyes, all of these techniques can be found in all professional animations because these are the fundamental aspects which make the animation seem believable.
After I created chose a sound clip from the 11 second club use when creating my animation, in professional workflows, the animators create their animation from sound clips. This is because it helps them with timing and give them a sense of how the character should be acting from the tone of the voice.
What I could of improved in terms of the animations, was the in-betweens, I could of made them more subtle and helps transition to the next key frame better. I also think I could worked on the lip syncing the match the voice and the sound clip better.
Another aspect I could of improved was the quality of the rendered animation because its looks low quality and makes it hard to see a lot of the facial expression. Increasing the final gather quality should fix this.
What I think I did well was that I created good contrasting key poses with a strong line of actions. I also was able to make animation snappy giving life to the characters.
What I could of work in terms of the overall project, was to redo my story board because the animation was very cartoonish , I could of made it more subtle and realistic.
For my animation I created a story board showing how the character would act, my idea was to have one guy angry at another because he stole something, I wanted to have two contrasting characters, so the angry guy movements are very flamboyant and all over the place, while the sad guys is very reserved and curled up, this is to show the different personalities, and show how they contrast. The way I would archive this is with strong key poses and a strong line of action for the angry person, and more subtle slower animation for the sad person. What I could improved was to make some of the movement more realistic as it is too cartoony, I could of done this using reference of real actors in a similar scene.
The next exercise was to animate the character picking up a weight,, what I found was a tutorial on picking up stones, this video not only helped as reference but the tutorial itself help me understand proper form for the movement.
what I focused of was the body mechanics and movement aspect. Examples like her back caving in because the weight is heavy, I also focused on the speed she was moving the stone because this indicated how much she struggling, lastly I gave her fleeting facial expressions to help show that she is struggling