Aim
To explore gestures on expressing slightly sad emotion of the character
Rationale
In my project, the character has to tell the players about the background story of the experience where the players are trapped in the past with a slightly sad expression.
Response
In the first version, the character bowed its head, lowered its shoulders and eyebrow to look sad. Then, I wonder if I can add some more gestures to its body parts to make the animation look richer. Therefore, I lowered the two ear-like yellow things (I’ve never thought of a purpose for them) in the second version. When I looked at the animation carefully, it seems that the time when the ear-like things lowered was a little bit weird. In addition, when I tried to do the sad expression myself, I found that the arms should move together with the shoulders. Hence, the ear-like things were lowered when the character started to say “we’re trapped in the past” and the arms moved together with the shoulders in the third version.
Reflection
As stated in last week’s exercises reflection, bowing the head and shoulders did make the character look sad. I was not sure how I could animate the eyebrow of the character and Nick has suggested making use of the upper edge of the black part of the character as the eyebrow. The result was looking good. Through this week’s practise, I realised that the timing to make some movements is important. In addition, it’s important to think of the joints and how the body parts are linked together in order to animate natural movements.