Motion observation.

When we watch animations, especially animated non-human characters, we don’t usually consider that all their moves are based on a real-life observation. Nature, animals and humans are references being then translated to the animation world. 

During the second Virtual Trajectories lecture we focused on visual traits, movements reflecting character’s personality and mood. One of our tasks was to find key poses of a character. There were several well-known animated characters to choose from. I picked Timon from the Lion King movie in the scene where he is responsible for distracting hyenas. I watched the scene frame by frame several times, captured key poses and gathered all the images in my Padlet called Timon’s dance.

We then talked about how the way the certain character moves conveys the mood of the scene; how a particular set of moves can express certain emotions.

We have watched a scene called the Magic Carpet from the Aladdin (1992) movie to understand more about expressing emotions through animations. 

Based on what we have observed and learnt, we were to plan a walk cycle of a flour sack. We had to sketch a few ideas of a walk expressing some emotion. My rough sketches are available here. The next step was to create a simple animation based on our plan.

The final step and a task for the week was to animate the flour sack in a dramatic moment. It was supposed to be based on our own reference – us acting the scene we want the sack to be animated in. I recorded a short video of me being scared in a way if something made me jump, where I lifted my hands up and made a big, almost theatrical gesture. I present this task on my Padlet called Flour sack. Big emotion.