Human Movement/Reference Research

As both Hayley and I's characters are both human like, Mat gave me some advice on researching human movement so that we will be able to understand how to move our models more realistically, as well as avoid being stuck on how to pose a character.

WEIGHT was a big thing that kept cropping up in my research. To make an animated character look realistic or even more exaggerated, considering where the position of the characters weight is, will emphasise this, as this is a common factor in human movement. For example, as my character will be throwing a ball, I will need to consider the weight of each leg. I will have to think about what leg she will be standing on, and how much weight will be on the ball of the foot, a well as her back as this is where her force will come through when she is doing the throwing action. 

Another thing that I learnt was that, humans don't appear to move in a very structured way. They are very swift and expressive. A lot of the times in animation, animators can make their character move in a 'robotic' manner, because in a way they are puppetting the character, and aren't actually inside them, so cannot fully provide the exact motions that they character is 'feeling'. Therefore I am going to have to pay a lot of attention to how I am making my character move to avoid this, especially because when I was posing my character for the turntable, I did find that sometimes she could look very stiff and structured.

One more aspect that I realised was that, facial expressions are also important. Human use facial expressions to show how they are feeling on the inside, to let others know what they are thinking. Although my character does not have a mouth, she does have a nose and eyes, and I kept reading that a lot of the time animation can fall into 'the uncanny valley' because of how there is something 'off' about facial expressions. I have rigged my eyes, so I am going to be using these a lot to covey the emotions that my character is feeling, as well as over exaggerated body movements, as this seems to be one of the most important factors in replicating human emotions to an audience in animation.