Once I’d gotten to a good place with my character’s (who I’ve come to call Wayne- Wayne T. Worm) entrance animation, I was left with mostly facial animation and reaction shots; good opportunities to show more of his personality. It was always my plan to have his hat act as cross-looking eyebrows, but in rigging him I discovered that he could be more expressive than I initially intended for him to be- just by tipping the control on his hat to one side or the other and rotating the below controls he could look side to side, or as if he was raising an eyebrow, or as though he was looking up. I was excited by this initially and so, naturally, I was looking forward to animate his reactions.
The first instance of this was a simple shot of him looking to his sidekick onto which I added a little rustle of his hat. Beyond that the main reaction was to the cowboy boot under which the bugs get crushed before their stand off reaches any sort of satisfying end. Although this was quite quick to animate, it yielded pretty fun results that I enjoy.
After seeing Liam’s character’s reaction to the boot wherein he throws his gun in the air however, I felt inclined to add some more interest to it by having Wayne drop his gun and relax his tail in shock rather than throw his gun in fear as Liam’s does. I felt him dropping his gun was more appropriate to his character.
I enjoyed animating the little bounce of the gun on the ground after it’s slid down his tail. It’s a very subtle detail but I find it feels much less physically based without it.
The other main shot with my worm’s gun is its introduction. It won’t be entirely clear in the short from where Wayne draws his gun as we felt that was best left ambiguous instead of trying to figure out how to show the action of him getting the gun in its entirety, so his tail comes into shot grasping it and in the edit I imagine the sound of a gun cocking will accompany it to help sell the action.