Character Animation - Project 1

This month I was in the character animation class and we had two projects to work on in the four weeks.

Final

For the first project, I chose the scenario "your character walks up to lean against a tree (or sit down on a bench) and a spider drops down and scares him." Below are my exploratory thumbnails, storyboard, and action breakdown for the scene.

Below is the progress I made daily on the animation:

Blocking

2nd Pass

For the 2nd pass I adjusted my camera angle to improve the horizon line and to make Antsy take up more space in the frame. I also strengthened some of my weaker poses and began to add breakdowns between the actions.

3rd Pass

At this point, the walk was basically done and I added anticipations to the actions.

4th Pass

In this pass, I worked on improving my weak anticipations and adding them where they were much needed. In the final animation at the top of this post, you can see that there were a lot of anticipations missing and I had to work to improve the final pose.

This project taught me a lot about animation and showed me what I still needed to work on in order to improve my skills. In this project, I learned the proper poses of a jump, but I still had some trouble with the landing since he was falling. I also learned about the importance of anticipation, which was always lacking in my animations before I started this class. Overall, there are still a few things that I would fix in this project, but I'm happy with how it turned out.