Head Turn

 

For the process of animating a head turn, I chose to use one of my original characters. Luckily, the process of animating the head to move smoothly and in a convincing arc wasn't too difficult. Instead, the real challenge was in getting everything else to follow the head precisely!

The first major hurdle came with the body. Outside of the arm lines, I had a difficult time trying to understand the way that the body and especially the neck would twist over the course of the animation. After animating the body and face, I was faced with an even greater challenge: the hair. I broke it down into several basic shapes: one for the bangs, two for the side partings, and one for the ponytail. Though it definitely made the process of adding the hair in afterwards easier, it was still rather time-consuming. The way that the bangs parted in particular forced me to answer questions about the design of my character on the spot in order to make sure that the hair stayed connected and consistent.

Though I wouldn't call it a "difficult" final step, cleaning up all the layers one frame at a time in order to make sure nothing overlapped incorrectly and erasing all the guiding lines I previously used was also a very intricate process. This was definitely the most intensive assignment of the class by far, and one that I wish I had a little more time to work with. However, I'm happy with the final result nonetheless. It's really rewarding to be able to see the final project come to life at the very end after hours of work.

Flour Sack Animation

 

For my flour sack animation, I chose to recreate an example of a victory dance featured in the Kirby series. In terms of body composition, I thought that Kirby and the flour sack were somewhat similar, having a simple main body with stubby appendages in the place of arms and legs, so using an animation from this series as a reference from this project came to mind immediately. However, I soon came to learn that there were many differences between these two characters and styles of animation that would prove a challenge to adapt.

I broke my animation into several "moves" to simplify the process for myself. The timeline of the animation is as follows: first, a victorious key pose, performing a "wave" motion with the flour sack's "arms", a spin with arms raised that transitions back to the victory pose, a short hop, a backflip, and finally a return to the key pose after an exaggerated landing crouch. Given the speed of this scene and thr amount of actions that the character takes, trying to cram them all in fluidly while still adhering to typical animation principles such as timing and spacing was tricky. The flour sack having their limbs tied to the corners of their body also made hitting some of the more exaggerated motions such as the wave or the crouch difficult. Kirby's arms and feet typically have the freedom to slide around his body slightly as he lacks any joints, but this is not something I could feasibly recreate with the flour sack.

In spite of, or perhaps partially because of these interesting challenges, I had a lot of fun recreating this dance sequence. In particular, I'm really happy with how snappy the sequence of the hop, backflip, and crouch came out. My main regret is not looking into how to sync up the proper music to back the animation - it would probably make the dance all the more lively!

Flour Sack Gestures

 

This assignment was broken up into two parts: I created a gesture sheet for a flour sack character that I would then reference for an animation using this character. I ended up creating two different sheets; the original one was done on my usual art program and featured more basic poses as I got used to recreating the proportions and features for my flour sack, while the second sheet was done afterwards on Harmony and allowed me to work with more expressive and outlandish poses. This second one in particular was helpful for me in understanding how to push some of the more elaborate poses I ended up using in the animation.