Aim
To reiterate with some of the existing animation
Rationale
Some of the gestures of the character are too subtle and are not obvious. Hence, I tried to further explore some minor details in the animation to see if they work better than the current version of animation.
Response
A frustrated artist | Award Winning | CGI 3D Animated Short Film
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJWBLLtdLq4
Overcomer Animated Short | Hannah Grace
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6ui161NyTg
Sad expression
A fourth version of animation to express the sad emotion of the character was iterated. The ear-like component on the head was further lowered like the ears of a rabbit when the character said “we’re trapped in the past.” In addition to that, its head shook left and right to express the sad emotion of the character. With reference to the two animations above, the characters do shake their heads instead of holding their heads straight upright to show the unhappy emotion.
Pupil
When I combined the three short animations of “Hi”, “Nice to meet you” and “we’re trapped in the past together”, I forgot that the first part “Hi” was made before I experimented with the pupil. Thus, the character’s eye changed from plain white to the one with pupil suddenly in the animation. Then, I tried three versions of the character without pupil, with big pupil and with small pupil to see which one looks most natural. Personally, I think the one without a pupil looks better, but when I asked the others most of them thought the one with the big pupil looked the best among the 3 versions.
The line of sight while the character is talking
As the head looks so small when the character is teaching the users to use the application. The animation of mouth stretching and eyes blinking are not obvious. Hence, the animations were reiterated with more exaggerated mouth stretching and eyes looking up.
Reflection
I think the fourth version of a sad expression is able to deliver the emotion of sadness the best. Then, I’ll follow the decision of the audiences to choose the second version of the character with a big pupil for my work. I was not sure which one to pick for the animation but most of the people I asked preferred the original one. As a result, I'm going with the original one.
Links:
Four versions of sad emotion
https://youtu.be/t46Hvvg4JQM
Three versions of pupils
https://youtu.be/EjwaNfeL3aE
Character looking up while talking
http://https://youtu.be/l9F1Os0j0O0