Applied 2: Starting To Animate!

Yesterday Hayley and I began the stop motion animation process for our documentary animation. I was really nervous to start this, purely because I didn't know what to expect or how this would come out. I was mostly trusting Hayley to teach me how to animate using models as she has more experience than me so I was extremely glad she was my partner for this project!

          

However, I found beginning to animate so much fun! I have gotten used to animating digitally, so much so that I completely forgot how exciting stop motion can turn out! These are the first few seconds that we captured on our first day animating and I can honestly say that I am so proud of them! I had no idea we could achieve something like this!

I am quite embarrassed to show this but this is how I calculated what mouth pose should go where and when. Before we animate, Hayley and I sit down and go over at least three of four seconds of audio and work out the mouth shapes together, both acting them out, watching each other for any obvious increments and just going off what we think feels best. This is my system to remember each of the mouths which I cross off each frame as we take it on Dragonframe. Though it might not make sense to anyone else, it allowed me to follow where we were up to easily and see what is next, which I think worked because I am quite happy with how we synced up the animation and audio! 

As you can see in the video, we focussed on getting the mouth poses correct, but we also wanted to add some life and character into the newt. Hayley was really great and remembering when to add blinks and eye movements to bring that naturalness to the animation, and I think I was good at smaller movements such as the tail and hand in this one. We spent ages animating the tail because I really wanted it to move from the bum not the tip as this ended up looking too fabricated, whereas with moving it from the bum, it added weight to the tail and a better fluidity. I also really enjoyed animating the hand, as it gave the newt emphasis, and in general was fun to move around.

Overall I think Hayley and I are making a great team thus far. We do around 2 seconds each and then switch roles. These roles are animating and directing. One person animates and steps away, whilst the other sits at the computer, captures the frame, but also toggles between live and previous frame on dragon frame and directs where the next placement should be! I am surprisingly enjoying both of these roles, because it is so satisfying to see the results come together.