sally animation tests

We got the sally rig yay =D and as i have been assigned animation director before me and jen started animating the shots that contained only sally in i needed to make some test animations. This is so that when we started animating both of us had an idea of how sally would move. Then with the actual shots in the film the animation would flow and the viewer hopefully won't be able to tell a difference between who has been animating what.  

With Sally's personality we need to show her cute and playful side so with the walk i tried to make it bouncy. One of the problems with spiders is that people are freaked out by the way they move so i tried to make her not scary in her movements which i think works with this test walk. sally's walk was a challenge as the swaying i gave her made her look like she was strutting or a gangster which wasn't what i wanted but think it worked out alright in the end.

I then went on to making test animations of sally pushing and pulling something. The push test i kept simple and she reminded me of a puppy while animating it as i gave her a bit of a bum wiggle before she went to push. I think this shows she has a playful personality.

I really enjoyed animating the pull test as i played around a bit more and i like the part where sally pulls the key and the first look at the key shows her interest. However i wasn't happy with bits of the animation like the second look at the key at the beginning didn't really work for me but didn't really know what to add either which was annoying. Also after showing the tests at the production meeting they commented on how sally rubbing her hands in preparation to pull the key doesn't really come across and that her personality doesn't really show very clearly in this animation. Which i completely agree with and if i had more time i would of liked to alter it but it is still a good reference for how sally would pull something and the comments are really helpful for when we work on the actual animation. I really enjoyed animating these tests specially as have been excited to play with the rig and has been quite a while since i have been animating. I was impressed with the sally rig as well as dan is learning as he has been rigging the character and she was very easy to use and there wasn't that many problems with her that needed fixing which was great =D.