Week 6: Animating Shots

This past week for Advance production, we finally dove right into focusing on animating. Currently, the scene set up for our animation is still a work-in-progress, so in the meantime we started on animating UPS David with the scaled props. Our team lead, Chloe, finalized who is animating what shots and established deadlines for sending playblasts to add to syncsketch.

I did have a mix up concerning my first animation for our project. I confused shots 3 for shot 6 as they both had facial animation. Luckily when I had completed it, my other team member, Pao, had not started the facial animation for UPS David. So it wasn't an extra animation and will be used in our syncsketch.

When I was working on the animation for Shot 3, I had time to ask for feedback from both Chloe and Pao about the timing and expression for the shot. Thanks to their input, I was able to fixup some minor details like making a more neutral expression than the previously angry one, removing some holds, and adding some squinting on the eyes.

When I was working on Shot 6, I had some reference recorded to use for UPS David. In comparison, to the storyboard, I animated a more half body shot instead of only an upper body one. The reason being that I wanted to experiment with some more body movement to better communicate the surprise and annoyance of being thrown the cookie.

As I was blocking out the animation, I had the full intention of having UPS David step back as he is thrown the cookie and lean down to spit the cookie out to the side. I believe I successfully achieved that goal, but I think I'll refine the animation a bit more by pushing the poses to more of an extremely to really sell that comedic effect. To fully incorporate that, I'll reference some cartoons to get a better feel for it.

Compared to last week, the version of UPS David that is being showed here has no hat. The reason behind that is, again, because of the issues of having the hat to remain on UPS David for the entirety of the animation. For shot 3, UPS David remains static in COG movement. In shot 6, UPS David has to step backwards as he is reacting to the cookie and bend forward to remove it. The hat would 'break' in the sense that it would remain at the origin position rather than follow along with UPS David and the change in his COG. When trying to find a work-around for this issue, it proved to be difficult even with a fixed file and would animate sloppy when it was keyframed. So when rendering out the shots for this week, I opted to hide the hat for a cleaner render and animation.

This upcoming week, I'll continue animating my remaining shots and refining my already completed ones with the feedback I'll gather from Frank and my team members.