Animation Project: Dialogue #01 - Part 3

 

 Animation Project - Dialogue #01

Part 3 - First Full Pass

April 2021

 This is the last progress report for this initial segment of animating a dialogue piece. After refining the mouth animations, I went ahead to animate the body movements and set up the camera. Since I purposefully split the dialogue into separate parts, I moved the camera as if they are connected scenes without being one single shot. Once synced up, I did my best to convey proper flow and rhythm to the overall animation. The rig I have used for this project is the Polly rig from NoisyChain on Turbosquid.

https://youtu.be/wThv1hLdfTk 

It was much easier to block out the body movements based on the reference video I shot, with multiple passes. I picked the most impactful poses and tried to replicate as close as possible. However, I did take liberties and also tried to accentuate the character 's movements in order to make the animation more dynamic. Sticking too close to the real-world proportions would dampen the readability of the scene. Once blocking was done, switching to spline and editing the in-betweens was not too tough. 

There were parts where it was difficult to pace the facial animation alongside the body motions so that the character was still relevant to the camera. I only wanted a stationary camera for this first dialogue piece, so no fancy movements from the viewpoint. This was meant to convey the audience as actual onlookers in the scene. 

Additionally, one of the hardest parts was not going too far with the body animation. Sometimes during the process, I found myself exaggerating the movements too much, and at the expense of the perspective I had already established. The character would turn too far or flow way too bouncy or stiff at times. Upon re-evaluation, I went back to fix as much as I could, but evidently some parts are still a bit much for the tone of the dialogue.

Overall, this has been a teaching moment for my journey with animating. I do not think this project turned out as I would have hoped, but at least I was able to reach an endpoint. I will leave this project alone for a little bit in order to focus on other things. I would like to return to this in time, but for now I think I need to put my mind elsewhere, so perhaps I can come back with new and fresh ideas. I feel that in order to improve, I would be better off restarting the whole process with a different strategy.