Aim
Re-animate and test out the minor-gestures in greeting (Revisit body movement aspect in week4)
Rationale
After consulting with Nick, I have decided to use Adobe After Effects instead of using the hand-drawn linework style with Adobe Animate. Therefore, I have to re-animate the character saying “hi” this week. On the other hand, I haven’t tested out different minor-gestures in the “nice to meet you” part of the animation.
Response
I decided to switch back to After Effect because I found myself more familiar and efficient to work on animation with After Effect which allows me to test out more different versions of minor-gestures within the same amount of time. Also, my character is the artificial intelligence in an App which is a time machine from the future that line work animation may not be a suitable graphic style. A rather flat graphic style with colours would suit with the background story of my character more.
Chris has mentioned that version 3 in the “say hi” animations I posted in week 8 has the best balance between too calm and too energetic and I agree with that. Thus, I re-animated version 3 “say hi” animation in After effect with the character of the red colour scheme. The character waved its hand as well as its body without shaking the base. As suggested by Nick, a slight squeeze in the mouth was animated while the character said “hi” and it looked more vivid.
After that, I started to experiment with slightly different gestures in the “nice to meet you animation”. In version 1, it jumped slowly and jumped one more time after saying “nice to meet you”. I thought it’s too slow and tried to make the two jumps happen within the time it says “nice to meet you”. It looked more natural with the new frequency of jumping. For version 3, I’ve manipulated the overlapping of different body parts and added some motion in the head as well.
Link of coloured character saying "hi"
https://youtu.be/QyMtQJHo87E
Reflection
I remember that Nick had mentioned the overlapping of different body parts and making the pivoting movement originating from the bottom segment. Therefore, I tried to make the body stack on the base and the head going slightly lower and stacking on the body when it landed in version 3. The observation of jumping in week 4 helped a lot in animating this gesture.
Forgetting about the pauses between jumps, the character was animated to lean down immediately after the first jump and looked too busy. Then, a one-minute short pause was added between the jumps and it looked more natural.
How successful were you with this practice? How do you know?
I think it is quite successful, because when compared with the previous animation of “nice to meet you”, the stacking of different body parts makes it look more flexible and robotic. In the previous animation, the whole character looked like a whole rigid substance without joints and flexibility. In addition, when I sent it to my classmate for opinion, she said it looked a lot better than the previous animation.
Have you come across any new related works that inform your larger IOL project for the semester?
Rob the Robot's Space Virus Blues | Space Robots Cartoon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMuatcbBhow
Besides the jumping animation, I’m also working on the “we’re trapped in the past” animation in which the character sounds and looks a bit sad. I was looking into different references for gestures and facial expressions to show the sad emotion. Then I came to this animation that the red robot showed a sad emotion by lowering its eye-lids and shoulders. Also, it bowed its head to look sad. I can take this as a reference when animating the sad emotion of my character.
What do you need to iterate further or reiterate in terms of your past practice in coming weeks?
In the coming weeks, I need to reiterate on the sad animation of my character. Also, I may add a teaching gesture of the character to tell the users how to use the app.
Describe one insight you have had about your practice this week?
I think the squeezing of the mouth and overlapping of different body parts are the biggest insight of this week's practice that they really displayed a good effect on the animation.