Over the Easter holidays i was mainly working on responsive and COP but i still managed to get started on the key poses for the grandmother. I wanted to make sure these were perfect as the grandmother is the most important character to get right. There are so many subtleties which can be easily missed when animating her character.
The backgrounds weren't finished yet so i had to work from a template drawn up from the backgrounds. I wanted to try keeping to model as much as possible and having nice arcs of motion and squash and stretch but most of all i wanted to communicate to the audience what the woman is going through and what's going on in her head. I was comfortable animating hand drawn but animating the woman was a challenge. Mainly because there were no distinctive movements except from head turns and the limited dialogue. However i imagined a good animator could add personality and appeal to even the simplest and basic movement, therefore i thought a lot about this and how i could approach making the simplest movement still interesting and beautiful.
I think the key to solving this problem is to really get inside of the characters head and control them, in other words act out the movements as if you were that character. I took some reference of me acting out the movements and looked for subtleties in the motions that are interesting and add character.
To keep on model with the character designs and to keep consistency of the forms, i used a few sources of reference whilst drawing out the keys. I used the character sheets guy drew out from his character designs, i also used a zbrush concept sculpt of our grandmother character which i created quickly when i was playing around with getting to grips with zbrush. This is an example of implementing computer generated workflow into traditional hand drawn animation, how i see it is making the most of the technology available to improve my craft.
No comments:
Post a Comment