1 – observe real-life characters: observing people doing “natural” movements or interacting how they move is very useful to understand the timing and weight of that movement which is something that is not usual to notice.
2- study the psychology of movement: intention is really important to understand the process of that movement: the way we pose and pause can speak as well, the thought process behind actions can help identify with the animation itself.
3- seek out real world references: in order to have a staring point some guidelines for starting the animation it can be useful to record or find some recordings regarding that particular movement.
4- film yourself: to understand how and why a character should move sometimes it could be useful to record yourself the footage. In fact, I have found that for animation involving behavior if I act it out myself I can emote with the moments better and probably get the main “dna” of the animation, the basis to make it believable.
5- keep your rig simple: the best rigs are the ones which leave the animators to animate. They simply pick up the character and move them around them around without any complicated systems to contend with. Even for the body mechanics tasks I have used the character rig provided to us rather than one found on the internet because I thought that those were ideal to fulfill the assignment and let me experiment freely with the right amount of controls which as a first approach to animation they worked just fine.
6- form key poses first: following a layering system ensures you are not wasting precious time. The first layer should be quick poses at specific frames, to get a sense of timing. After the process is repeated adding more detail with each new pass. I have learned throughout the past weeks tasks is to work in sections by starting with the bigger view and going in more detail the more I proceeded. I applied this in particular with characters control starting from the controls that lead the moment such as the root control and spine and adding, only after those worked first, the other controls which were a consequence of those controls.
7- lead with the eyes: the eyes are what we are drawn to the most when we look at someone, and in most cases they are also the first thing to move before the rest of the body. Eyes are also responsible for the intention of the action: in fact is recording the reference footage when performing the lines I have poisoned a prop to aim the line to which help to create the intention and make the performance believable by literally looking at something just like it would be in real life.
8- study the effect of gravity: giving weight to an animation is really important. I think that this can also be correlated with the character posture which should not always be “perfect” but have a natural imperfections which we all have.
9- time your character movements: time can help exaggerate a movement and give emphasis too. Slower movements for instance are often used to show the character is feeling down or upset, just like the case of my performance animation in which the character was upset and the pauses in the animation were essential to convey it
10- keep your character balanced: we are constantly shifting the center of gravity to maintain balance so this needs to be applied to characters to while animating them which can help giving intention to the action
11- offset your keys: in order to give the wave of motions sometimes is useful to shift some keys positions for example for eye gaze when moving is usually the eyes moving and then the rest of the body.
12- don’t form every letter in speech: for lip sync in particular when animating the mouth not all the words of a speech should be included since it would look as the mouth moving too much too quickly.
Creative Bloq. 2021. 15 ways to improve your character animation. [online] Available at: <https://www.creativebloq.com/audiovisual/improve-character-animation-41411447> [Accessed 12 December 2021].