Mood Change

For my mood change i decided i wanted to have my character laughing with someone and then having to wave goodbye then when they go he's all depressed. I started of by filming each of the actions for reference.









I tried to make my actions exaggerated but i think i can cross out acting as a career path. I found it very hard to try and laugh really exaggeratedly when there was nothing funny in the first place to react to. But hope it came across better in the animation i produced.



I enjoyed making this animation the most and i am really starting to like character animation though i feel i need lots of improvement. With this animation as i used video footage as reference and used it for timing my characters movement i found that they became too slow in the final play blast. Which i need to watch out for in the future and only use the video footage as reference and not take the timing straight from it and adjust it so that it looks better in the animation. I found that the actions needed to be snappier. I do feel the actions flow but that flow to much into each other as i found it hard to get the character to pause without him looking dead =S. I think i should have added more to the end of the animation to make him look depressed and not just have him sigh as it would make people feel more sympathy for him. I think i need to improve the key poses in my animation as well and i did try to get the character into the main poses first of all and then add the inbetweens but couldn't really get the hang of animating that way because i added actions on the way. But will definitely make a block through animation of all the key poses for the 11 second club animation as i think it would really help and make my animation look more effective.

Like i said before im really starting to enjoy and get interested in character animation and think i could see myself working in this area (though still very undecided!?) The reason why i like it is because you give the character life and its always different your never doing the same actions because every character is different in some aspect. I would really like to improve in this area and have decided that im going to do some short character animations in my own personal time to improve (when i get myself organized with the work i already have.) I think as well that if i make a character and animate him i will be more motivated to play around but im going to make that my aim in the christmas holidays (though will start now when i have time) as rigging, modeling and getting a good character idea in the first place takes some time (especially the idea part for me =S) in the mean time i will continue to animate the characters that we are using now.