Reflection
Over the last few months I have been working on my personal development assignment which was to create a 8 – 12 second animation ( 2D or 3D) that involves the use of sound, whether it be music or dialog. I chose to do a 3D animation using the Azri rig to the sound of some dialog. My first step was to decide what dialog I wanted to use. I wanted to chose something that had a lot of emotion in the voice and was humorous, meaning could animate it slightly more cartoonish. After some looking around I found a few good clips from the TV show The Office. One was a simple joke were the character was slightly emotional and questioning her actions. The next one was funnier and had the character screaming in anger, showing a lot more emotion. I first tried the less dramatic one, as I already had a vision for what I could do. However, after a few hours of playing about in Maya and blocking out some poses I found that this dialog didn’t offer much to animate too, so I went with the next clip I found. In the end I found this one to be a lot easier to animate to and I could show a lot more emotion. Below is the clip.
After finally choosing my dialog I went about deciding the style of animation I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to do something showing lots of movement and facial expressions, but I wasn’t sure of how cartoonish I wanted to go. To help me decide I looked at the animations on the 11 Second Club. I really liked the type of animations on there and I felt they showed the type of movements I wanted to do. The hip, arm and facial expressions were important to me so I made sure to pick out ones that had the right movements. Below are links to the clips I used as references for parts of my animation.
https://www.11secondclub.com/competitions/january22/winner
https://www.11secondclub.com/competitions/february20/winner
Using the clip from The Office to set the tone and the 11 second club clips to help me style my animation, I began blocking out the main actions. This was easy enough as by then I had a good idea of what actions I wanted. I wanted to show her stomping her feet and throwing her arms around in anger, and a bit of sassy hip movements and head turns. There is a long pause at the start so I made sure to build up to the big stomp, and make it over dramatic. For the middle I wanted her shaking her arm in anger and making decisive, switch arm flicks. And since the end is a long scream I just had her throw her head down and have the arms and legs shaking, so its an abrupt/ cut off ending. After blocking out these main poses I then went to work on refining other parts such as the finger movements and the hips. Then I worked on the timings of everything, making sure to make the foot stomp fast and have the head lift at the start slow. I made sure to leave the facial movements to the end, after I had all the timings and body movements sorted. Facial animation was new to me at this point so I was a bit intimidated. I first did the eyebrows which I found not to be too difficult in the end. However, I found the lip syncing to be very difficult. I struggled to get the right mouth shapes for each word and I had a very difficult time actually timing them correctly with the sound. This part probably took me the longest in the whole process but in the end I feel I finally got it. After I got to a level were I felt I was nearly done, I sent it off to my tutor for feedback and see what fixes I could make. He felt that it looked too stiff in some areas and some of the movements looked unnatural. I agreed with this and made the appropriate fixes. Finally I felt I was finished.
Overall I am quite happy with my work and I feel this is my best animation yet as it defiantly shows a lot of personality and emotion. I will be happy to show this in my showreel.