Animating Scene Six

Scene five was all about the reaction to the throw, and where the ball lands as it is obviously not in the hoop. To begin with I really wanted to focus on eyes. Since the first 20 seconds of this animation are not close ups, with this scene I really got the chance to show my character's emotions. From my research on the Uncanny Valley and from Sara's lecture, facial expressions are extremely important for conveying to the audience the tone of the scene and what the character is feeling. Without them the animation can feel 'flat' and a bit off, so this was my chance to have a go at avoiding that!

Obviously my character doesn't have a mouth, but she does have eyes and since I rigged them I could move them so that her line of vision follows the brothers hat falling to the floor.

I then had her laugh as a reaction to his failure. This was EXTREMELY tedious to do. I had rigged my character's shoulders so that they rotated, but I wish I had been able to translate them as well as I really wanted her to move them up and down. I was able to emulate this through moving the clavicle, to get that up and down effect, but for every time I did this, I had to also move the elbow as this moved with the clavicle as well. I followed the reference video that Hayley filmed of me, and was able to replicate this to some degree. To then add a bit of mischief, I moved her hand to her mouth, to illustrate that she is hiding something (i.e her ability to win the game in a second). 

Reference video of me laughing.

To get the movement of the hat, I used a mixture of reference videos and my own intuitive. It is not the best animation of a hat falling off a head, but it was the best that I could do. In reality, a hat falls really quickly unless it is quite windy outside, but I wanted to have a swaying effect (like a feather) so that there would be this awkward silence, and the hat can drop slow enough for the audience to look at the little girls expression and then back again to see where it lands. This allowed me to have a go at animating objects as well as characters, and look at how they move and what their paces are in comparison to those in real life! 

My reference video.

I obviously exaggerated Hayley's characters hat falling off as I wanted it to be a bit more dramatic to how I had mine filmed. My hat was different to the cap that Hayley's character has on, so I knew that the weights would be different, as well as the velocity of the 'swooping'. My hat didn't really swoop too much, so I had to use my initiative on this, but I did generally follow the path of the hat falling from my reference video!