Session 6 - Good Examples of Body Acting

Body acting plays a vital role in effectively communicating with viewers. Body postures can help show/exaggerate a certain type of emotion/feeling without having to verbally speak their action(s).

As shown in the GIF above, we can see Scrat (the name of the character) displaying at least 4 identifiable poses from when he is sniffing the ground to when he slams the acorn into the ground. From each of these poses we can tell what Scrat is thinking and what he plans to do next.

STAGE 1: From this pose, we can tell that he is curious. He has his acorn tucked in away from what’s ahead. This action suggest he is trying to protect his acorn from what he is looking head. This is also exaggerated by his nose which is similar to the actions of what a dog would be doing by sniffing/smelling what is ahead of him, in order to gain a better understanding of what it is.

STAGE 2: From this pose, we can tell that after he realised it was safe for him to bring out his acorn (which he does do in this pose), the shows a face of excitement by opening his mouth and opening his eyes wide open. 
 

 

STAGE 3: From this pose, we can now clearly see that his body language is very expressive. It’s also clear to see what his next action is just by his current pose. This consists of 2 elements. The first being his body posture, his body is elongated upwards, stretched out and his arms are up high. From this, we can tell that he is ‘charging up’ for something. The second elements is told by his eyes. His eyes show us what he is planning to do with all this energy that he has built up. And from this alone, we can safely conclude that Scrat is planning to use the acorn and smash it into the ground.

STAGE 4: Finally, we can see that his last action is that he slams him acorn into the ground, as concluded from stage 3. We can tell by his facial expression that he is happy and pleased by the result of his actions from stage 1. On a side note, we can see that exaggeration is greatly applied here. If we look at his lower body, we can see that he is significantly high of the ground and by using what we know from stage 3, it goes to show how much power Scrat had in that initial build up. 

Primitive Character Animation Submission

YOUTUBE VIDEO LINK

For this animation, I had to use a simple character/primitive shapes to help exaggerate or display our chosen emotion. Since mine was anger, I had to use my squirrel character to help convey its emotion. The render consists of the squirrel doing a certain action twice which was the tail curling into a ball and slamming the ground, at the start and the end of the animation. This helps convey the message of the short animation which is that the squirrel is angry. The secondary action of the scene also helps exaggerate the squirrel’s emotion. Whenever the squirrel hits the ground using his tail, the scene props bounce up and down. This helps exaggerate the power of the impact that the squirrel gives in order to help overemphasize the emotion.

The main objective of the animation was to see how animations look without any “fancy render settings”. Most of the times, poor animation can sometimes be made up by fabulous renders, extra settings like GI, AO, shadows etc… Although this doesn’t help the actual animation look better, it covers up for any mistakes or the lack of quality the animation shows. By removing the “quality render” element, it ‘clear the air’ by showing how the animation looks when stripped down to its ‘bare bones’.

I believe my animation is good at a certain standard. I feel as if I could have improved the tail animation better, since the tail was quite difficult to animate as it was following an FK format (not that using an IK controller would be any better). I also believe that I’ve helped convey the characters emotion by using many of the 12 principles of animation. These include squash and stretch, staging, slow in and slow out, follow through and overlapping action, exaggeration, secondary action, anticipation and timing and motion. If the animation is observed closely, all of the mentioned principles can be seen in its entire integrity.

Overall I am pleased with the way the animation turned out but I believe I could have done better with a longer timeline but we were restricted to keep the animation to a very short timescale (<7-9 seconds).

 CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICAL FEEDBACK WITH IMPROVED ANIMATION

 

From the feedback that I was given during session 4, I decided to take what everyone had said into consideration in regards to my animation. Many of the changes I made were timeline curve based meaning I was not adding a load of new keyframe’s but instead modifying and experimenting with each of the values and seeing how it’ll affect the animation. In comparison to the first attempt, the changes I made were:

• Fixed the tail swinging and gave it movement throughout the entire animation.
• The tail flicks at certain parts to suggest a spring like energy build up from when the squirrel lands and when it takes off.
• The 2 scene props now rotate slightly when in mid-air. I decided to give it a weight distribution so that for example, the front end would go up first and then the back end would follow through.
• Used a better camera angle and the low position of the camera helps with convey the message of the squirrel (that he is angry).  

 

UPDATED ANIMATION VIDEO LINK