dee_readingnews

When I got a brief for task 3, I decided I was going to take a much more planned route in animating the dee rig character. Firstly I spent the entire evening acting out different emotional scenes of different changes in emotion and mood. The first one I went for was a guy lifting a liquid container and getting frustrated over not being able to lift it and then getting angry.I did not like this so I tried a guy screaming for joy after standing round in anticipation, I did not like this either so I tried someone waiting around and then going insane and I still didn't feel like i had captured two emotions. Then sitting on the side I saw my payslip from work, which when I had received I was majorly disappointed with an angry and so I thought this could make a good scene. So acted out me opening a letter and shaking it and screaming for joy and then realising that it's bad news and then suddenly freaking out. The second thing I did was to draw all the major keyframes by hand so I could get an understanding of the line of action I would need to use. And on some of these drawings i drew the main line of action and made sure that they were balanced poses. Thirdly when I first went to maya I took the key poses and every 10 frames put the character into these key poses and move them around accordingly to get the timing roughly right and also to make sure I had strong key poses, which I think I achieved quite well. I then went on to fill out the inbetweens and correct any translations and rotations that were odd. All this took quite a lot of time and I got quite frustrated with yet again making too many key frames, so i went back and sift out the unnecessary key frames. I had a bit of trouble getting their arms to independently yet in the right place at the right time when he first holds the paper up but I got a hang of it in the end. Even so the arms did look like they were glued together on the piece of paper, so i varied the timing of each arm slightly but i dont think it was enough. The anticipated pause of him reading the note in shock i believe was the right amount of time, but i had to fiddle around with the timing quite a bit first. Overall the stamping I felt very robotic matter how much I try to tweak the movements of each leg individually and the arms also a bit of a challenge to not have them looking robotic.Despite this i think the timing was okay the balance in the leg moving back and the stamping and as a result I think I achieved by most fluid animation so far with good lines of action and a good silhouette and I think it is believable as most people are able to tell what he's thinking and I think I've learned from this. I now just need to practice applying these principles some more. Lastly the shrug of the shoulders at the end I only put in to try and finish the piece nicely but I can see now that with this there is a little too much going on and for it to work there would need to be a greater pause on the shrugging and staring at the audience and acknowledging that they've been watching and that he thinks "so what" to the judgement of the audience, but as this would be a key moment in itself it would require anticipation also which i have not put in.