Illusion of Life: Week 10

Experiment: The Stillness before Death

This week, I spent some time playing with the final moment of the cock robin in my studio project. It’s a moment where the cock robin opens his eyes in the coffin, wants to come out and pranks his friends one last time but gets shot in the process. Two different iterations of the same animation were created for this experiment. The first iteration had some amount of stillness in it, but it’s not enough to build up the level of calmness needed for the final moment. For the second iteration though, it’s something that’s built on top of the first iteration. The basic animation is still there, however, I added another subtle movement between the sitting up and the getting shot animation of the cock robin so that the moment is longer. The implemented stillness has helped building up the calm and peaceful atmosphere for the shot, which creates the desired comedic effect when the arrow comes down and shoots the cock robin. The “out-of-a-sudden” effect works really well with the existence of stillness in the shot.

When creating the first iteration, I was imagining the action of the cock robin all in my head. To develop the second iteration more thoroughly though, I acted out what the cock robin is supposed to do. It helped me in figuring out the different amounts of stillness needed in between each action. One could say that the action of acting out the cock robin’s thoughts and movement helped me to design the character animation more easily and effectively.