Hello and welcome to my journey through assignment 2!

To keep things simple, this post is going to be split up into four main parts – one for each animation followed by a final reflection.

All of my animations were done in 2D, just like for assignment 1.

Weight lift from the ground

Starting off, we’ll take a look at the weight lift animation.

As this assignment is taking place during the second half of the first semester, I thought it suitable to have a Christmas theme for one of my animations. Thus, I came up with my first idea for this animation – Santa Claus lifting a heavy bag of presents.

I’ve considered how this animation would play out from A to Z, but in the end, I felt that it wasn’t going to work out.

For a brief summary –

1)Santa Claus looks at the bag.

2)He rubs his hands together in preparation.

3)He struggles but eventually lifts the bag and throws it over his shoulder.

4)A short moment later the weight of the bag brings him down and he falls backwards.

Although I liked the idea, the problem I had with it was the amount of time it would take to animate that entire scenario.

With that in mind, I opted for a short and more straightforward scenario – A golem picking up a rock, seeing a bug crawl out, getting scared and dropping the rock.

I felt more confident about this idea as it retained the element of comedy, without requiring a lot of time.

As well as that, I thought using a mute/faceless character would be a good way to practice animating body language, as I wouldn’t be able to rely on expressions or audio/voice.

Research and Design

I spent the first few days figuring out the correct design for my character.

Starting off, I gathered a considerable amount of reference images:

A lot of my workflow for this design was inspired by a YouTube video by Proko, where Scott Flanders explained how he designs unique characters: https://youtu.be/Xgh1anSSZL0?si=lY0pXGBX9_Xyuji3

To kick things off, I focused on everything I know about golems and what makes a golem.

Doing this was a good way of brainstorming, as with each word I could imagine different and suitable themes & aspects of the character I was about to design.

Using that wall of words, combined with my reference images I began sketching out a few silhouettes.

Which then evolved into a ‘final’ design, where I borrowed or expanded on features from my previous sketches. This technique is also one I picked up from Scott Flanders, in this video from Proko: https://www.youtube.com/live/wS8VIbUltpk?si=H2SeZYox53OWhQw_

Soon after finishing this design, I realized that I overcomplicated it all because I wanted it to look ‘cool’. I quickly scrapped it and went back to the drawing board.

This time I focused on simple shapes and basic silhouettes. I found that Pokémon, as well as Minecraft and Risk of Rain 2 were the perfect inspirations for this.

Animating and reflecting

The animation went smoothly, and I was quickly able to convey the idea of weight.

I believe I made the right choices throughout this part of the assignment, as spending even more time on a longer animation or animating a more detailed character would probably turn out to be detrimental for my other animations.

I found animating the golem to be a lot of fun, as I had a lot of creative freedom with his semi-detached limbs.

As well as that, I felt more confident conveying emotions through the golem’s simple expressions. The single eye, combined with small head movements allowed me to cover all of the emotions I had set out to.

As for my references, I mostly relied on diagrams.

I used this one, by Richard Williams.

As well as this one, though I’m not sure of its author.

Source: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/505458758171091333/

Lip sync

For my lip sync, I chose to use the introduction audio heard in the game Lethal Company after loading into a fresh game file.

When considering the correct character for this, I delved into the world of Lethal Company and took notes.

Outside of the player character (and their friends) I wasn’t able to find any other living, breathing creatures (not counting the monsters, of course).

Delving deeper, I noticed how the ‘company’ keeps contact with players to a minimum. Outside of the welcome message that I used in this assignment, there is no real effort to communicate with the players, except to tell them that their time is up, and they have to bring back what they found.

As far as aesthetics, the inside of the ship uses some very old technology by today’s standards. Simple, low-quality cameras, old computers, and a single pair of metal doors. The interior is plain, designed purely around functionality.

All of those factors can be summarized into two words – old and lifeless.

With that in mind, I was very careful with the design of my character. I wanted to create something that functions and fits with the ship’s interior but doesn’t clash with the ‘old and lifeless’ themes.

The only candidate I can think of is a basic AI face. Simple and functional, but not completely lifeless and strange, as to not immediately scare away new employees of the ‘company’.

As well as that, I think a computer-generated face would fit perfectly with the text-to-speech nature of the audio. As I already mentioned, contact with players is kept at a minimum.

As for the design of the face, I followed the same rules as the ‘company’ did when designing the interior – plain and functional. This meant no unnecessary features, such as a nose, hair, ears etc. A mouth and a pair of eyes seemed to fit perfectly.

Animating

While animating, I used some image references found on Google, as well as recording my own reference.

I found it useful to have the words written out while animating, as it was much quicker to read the word to myself and mimic the mouth shape than having to listen through the audio and wait for the word to come up.

One issue I ran into was that across the image references for mouth shapes, there were a few differences and dissimilarities. As a result of that, I mostly used the image provided by our lecturers.

A useful tip I picked up from a YouTube video about lip-sync was to use a small mirror so that you can clearly see the shapes your mouth is making. I found this very helpful. Here is a link to the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l3mVMqYJ4g

From that same video, I learned that having a simple head turn or blinking makes the characters feel more natural, and so I had my character blink from time to time as well as looking at the objects/areas of the ship which they were currently talking about.

To make the start of the audio (before the character starts speaking) more interesting, I thought having the computer/tv turn on would be a nice touch. For that, I used this reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp5DWmsXUtw

 

Run and jump

This animation is fairly unornamented when compared to my other two.

For a while I wasn’t sure how to handle this part of the assignment. At this point, my other two animations have taken up the majority of the time, so designing another character was going to be borderline impossible.

Previously I was planning on re-using the golem character for this animation. After animating the weight lift, I was confident with its body motions and how to successfully show their emotions/body language.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find good references for this combination of character and motions.

Looking back at my previous assignment, I wasn’t confident enough to attempt a ‘heavy’ run cycle again, unless I had the perfect reference.

With no better choice, I looked for other references. Soon after, I found a muscular guy performing a running jumping on YouTube and I knew it would be the perfect reference.

Around that time, I also looked through my classwork and found the standing-jump animation I completed in class.

With it I also found the reference I used at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBQBu-hQ5ec

After carefully analysing the video references, I concluded that the best thing I could do was to modify the previous class work by adding a run cycle to it.

Naturally, a standing jump and a running jump lift off the ground in different ways. However, once they’re up in the air the motions are fairly similar, as far as animation goes.

My plan was simple – I would add a run cycle and the beginning of the jump to the second half of the standing jump, and then adjust it where needed.

Looking back, I think that was pretty resourceful of me, considering I only had a few days left before the assignment is due.

Later, I animated a water splash effect where the feet landed. This secondary animation helped bring a bit of realism to the animation and I believe it made the whole thing more satisfying to watch. Without it, the animation was very plain and basic, which is something I always try to avoid in my work.

This is the reference I used for it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQLEV-0CeEE

At the end of the day, I believe that this turned out to be a good piece of work, despite the challenges I faced. However, compared to the other two animations, this one is probably the least capturing/interesting.

 

Final Reflection

Overall, I believe I did pretty well in this assignment.

There were times when I would get stuck or begin losing motivation, but I was always able to quickly bounce back and find new ways to approach the problems I had.

I’m also quite happy with the amount of research that I gathered for each animation, especially considering that not all references were easy to come by.

By comparison, I believe my previous assignment would have also turned out much better, had I spent as much time gathering research as I did for this one.

Finishing an assignment over the Christmas and New Year periods was naturally quite stressful. However, in some ways it also helped me to focus on the task, as there were no lectures taking place, which meant no travel time and the freedom to alter(ruin) my sleep schedule.

I appreciate all of the work and preparation that our lecturers put into preparing us for this assignment, and I’m especially thankful for the reduction of animations from 4 to 3 by Alec.