The facial acting is probably the exercise I found the easiest to do. I had a clear image in my mind from the beginning of what I wanted the animation to look like and enjoyed the process of playing with exaggeration and performance to create a fun and dynamic animation.
Initially creating the reference video was quite hard, It took me several goes, to really find something that reflected what I wanted to create. Initially I was too focussed on just the facial expressions rather than the entire performance in context. This led to a really still and restricted sequence that wouldn’t have the clarity or readability needed for animation. After working with Ko, I was able to get a far better reference that had engaging movement and performance that would produce are far more effective and interesting animation overall.
My first step, which made a huge difference this time, especially in comparison to my Body Acting was that I started by drawing thumbnails. I think over the course of the Christmas break, I really forgot about the key processes of animation: that being Thumbnails – > Keys -> Timing -> Breakdown -> In-betweening. Skipping or accidentally reordering these vital stages meant that I was trapping my self in corners with animation that just fundamentally wouldn’t work, causing me to have to begin again and again. This is, even though the thumbnails themselves weren’t reflective of the final animation, I really took the time to work in order with caution and care and I believe this is evident in the final animation.
Once I was in the process of in-betweening the main animation, I found once again that I was using smear frames and speed as a crutch when I felt intimidated by fast movement. I was stuck on the idea that any quick movement had to use smears in order to be effective. Christina was instrumental in helping me understand that smears should only really be used in the most extreme movement and even then really minimally in order to have impact and not dilute the sequence. I think my main concern was that with out smears the animation would be slow and boring, but actually using them considerately in moderation maximises their effect and allows the animation to have flowing energetic movement without feeling odd or forced.
Looking at the below animations you can see the top V1, which is reliant on smears, in comparison to my final submission which moves far more naturally and successfully.
Below you can find some of the reference videos I used to create the butterfly animation. Whilst i didn’t want to spend too much time on the butterfly in comparison to the character, I did want to make sure that the character had enough react to and something that would work within the animation without being distracting. For this I used just three key frames in sequence to create a simple wing flap and then just relied on timing and placement in order to create flight.
What I didn’t anticipate was just how many frames it would take to finish the flight animation. Working on anything between 1s and 5s, the sequence ended up being around 550 frames, which made it almost as many as the full character animation which ended up being around 570 frames. This sheer number of frames as well as the complexity of the timing and synchronisation with the character movement, meant that I really relied on using image marks and notation for the first time. This proved incredibly useful and I went back and implemented it on my Body Acting files in order to really effectively and simply keep track of my different layers and sequences.