Character and Narrative - Week 8 Summary

This week we started animating, we found the Maya animating process really fast and easy. First of all we split the scenes so we each had an equal amount of scenes to animate, we also decided to use different maya scenes for each scene. This was to make Maya run faster and also incase a scene gets corrupted or errors occur at least its just one scene and not the whole animation. When animating i began by blocking out the key poses for the characters first, working on stepped tangents and then when the key poses were good enough i started animating the overlapping action which i found easier with smoothed out tangents. I really wanted to try and push the poses so when i was animating i had my sketchbook next to the keyboard and i would draw the poses very fluidly and try to achieve a heavily exaggerated pose to try and get the most out of the poses in Maya. Some scenes were harder than others to get organic movement so we recorded each other acting out the scenes for reference. for the more emotional, impacting scenes me and Brenda helped each other out alot trying to capture what the feelings actually feel like and how they can feel right visually. The rigs i created only had a few squash and stretch features but for the scene when Totsi enters the tent we needed a much higher level of deformation so i used a lattice to get the stretching that we needed to make the animation look pleasing.