Animation Process and Practice: Week 1

Animation Performance 

For the first term we have been assigned to create a character performance based on an eleven second audio clip. The audio clip is some dialogue from the film ‘Hot Fuzz’ where Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) interviews a resident (Stephen Merchant) about a missing swan, and he must describe what the swan looks like.

Within the context of the film, this is a silly situation because everyone knows what a swan looks like, yet he must describe it for a police officer, moreover a highly trained police officer is sent on such a ridiculous task.

We must listen to the audio track over and over again to gain an understanding of the actor’s within the track, their pauses, breaths and thoughts. From there we must visualise the situation and breathe life into the character we choose to portray. Part of the unit includes choosing which medium we will use to create the scene (2D, 3D, Stop-motion).

Personally I have chosen the 3D route, this is because I already have some experience animating a rigged character in Maya (as mentioned in my SG Gaming Experience post) and I feel this will be the field I wish to pursue as my future career. For the 3D route, we are provided a fully rigged model, unlike last year where we were taught to model and rig the characters. This allows us to focus on the animation, and performance of the character rather than the technicalities of Maya.

Despite the medium choice, the principles and fundamentals are the same throughout. Therefore we share the lectures together to discuss ideas based upon the ideas of the animation principles and how to bring out the best performance in our characters.

I intend to plan the action of my character first and I will do this by first understanding the audio. I have decided upon a situation where the character is asked what the swan looks like. The character will be on board with the idea and describe the swan, and when he believes he has described it effectively, he finds it insulting that he has to point out that it is a swan. Much like a game of charades that the only person you see is the character, and the other who is asking the questions is behind the camera. I would like to take this idea further and have the character acknowledge there is a camera and this is shown through eye movements and consciousness of facing the camera. I believe this will add an additional layer of believability and express aside of the character such as embarrassment and consciousness of the camera much like an interviewee.

I started with initial sketches and ideas on how the character can be posed, if he talked with his hands, his emotions and how this changes through the clip. There are a lot of factors to consider, I intend to incorporate complex emotions and how they change through the clip without over acting the character. This will be done through eye movements with strong staged poses.

Initially I had trouble finding a 3D model which both provided enough control including facial features, and worked properly. I found models I liked including the ‘Morpheus’ Rig from the 11 second club, and I have chosen to use this rig so far. I had to search a number of answers first regarding customisation and problems with the rig.

I have created the first three poses illustrating the first positions the character will take. I have tried to time the positions to the audio, as I plan to create the key positions and animate between them. As I have had initial trouble with the rig, I will ask my tutors for help regarding this problem, but what is important that I have established the initial poses of the character; developing his personality.

I will continue my work with more thoughts on how to stage the poses to ensure that the body language alone illustrates the thoughts of the character effectively. I will do this with more thumbnails and experimenting the limits of the rig.