Final Evaluation
Overall, with this assignment, I had a lot of fun gathering knowledge and honing my skills. It has taught me the importance of body language, weight, and using references to make motions more accurate. For my emotion animation, I decided to make the Monty model appear scared. I did this by making him caught off guard, jumping away from the source, and falling backward at the end. This gave the impression that he is being chased or is frightened by a moving object. I feel as though my execution of this worked rather well as the motion and timing are fluid. Not only that but the use of squash and stretch in the model emphasized this even further. For the weight animation, I wanted to do something simple as I knew that the emotion one would be a bit more complex to do, thus taking up more time. The action I chose was a simple jump animation, however, the model trips at the end and rolls back. The point of this was to convey that he landed and then lost his balance last minute. Moreover, the outcome of this animation was nicely done in terms of timing and how I made the character lean and squash and stretch to emphasize weight. This made it appear natural and visually pleasing. One thing that I would re-consider is the roll at the end of the jump. It is a bit frantic and jittery, almost stiff. I struggled a lot with this and tried to fix and add more frames, but the animation just got worse and was being problematic, unfortunately not fitting the time constraints. This ended up being my final result. Despite this, I think both of these animations are really good attempts at body language and movement, and I think the main reason they both turned out better than expected is due to how I did research, studies, and acted out the actions myself. In the future, I will continue to do this as a part of pre-production as it has made the results and quality more impressive than initially imagined.
Emotion animation- fear
Weight/action animation- jump
Some progression screenshots…
Below, I have included some screenshots of my progress with these two animations. With these photos,
you can see when I began blocking frames, working in the dope sheet, and also tweaking the frames in the sequence.
SyncSketch links:
Action: https://syncsketch.com/playground/a2eff14a08d34b5c9d4fd56daf420d60#/4595074/5256099
Emotion: https://syncsketch.com/playground/88ef857640eb48ce8ee1da7d2bea9394#/4595077/5256102