IOL week 7 -hair flip sequence

This sequence was heavily iterated early on in the project and was the foundation of the protagonist’s overarching character movement throughout the project. 
Began with rough pencil animations of their dance movement. I wanted them to interact with and jump up on top of the speaker, so in Toon Boom I imported the png file of the corresponding background art so that I could animate according to the background
Using the background art composite, I had to come up with the choreography for the character. The little somersault/vault that they do at the start of the sequence was referenced from a video from the 2016 Rio Olympics

Something that I iterated over a few times in the dance sequence prior to adding in the hair was the character’s stumble over the back of the speaker. I wanted to get a sense that they had lost their balance and were a little bit drunk. Testing the timing by moving the keyframes up and down the timeline was one way that I checked the pace of the clip. I wanted there to be a sense like the character missed their footing and didn’t expect to overshoot their landing, and to convey this there is a brief delay where the lower body dips down past the speaker but the upper body and head leans back. This iteration enhanced that sense of stomach dropping surprise and missing their footing.

Another element in this iteration that I went over several times was the motion of the hair. Once I had the initial pencil animation of the character’s body finished, I went in with a different colour to add another layer of the hair. At this stage in the story, the character has literally and figuratively let their hair down, and so this sequence was to showcase the full extent of their long and flowing hair. After the first rough animation was done, I did a first draft of a cleanup layer which had more detail of the hair added in as opposed to a general rough blob. The first iteration of this was, as I found from feedback from my tutors, good except that the hair movement did not have enough of this sense of weight and momentum to it. In my next iteration, I redid the hair animation but as the character pirouettes around, I exaggerated the length and follow through of their hair. This adjustment creates a greater sense of weight and momentum in the character’s movement.