Stillness or pause
Aim
Explore stillness in different combinations
Result
Stillness in the environment
The crops on the farmland and the clouds in the sky were still when there was no wind. When the wind blew, they started to move. The clouds motion was calmer than the crops motion which shook to and forth as the wind blew. All of them went back to stillness when the wind was gone.
Pause in character interaction
The person kept nodding and blowing up the “bubble” when he slept and the ghost was so excited behind him. When the ghost hit the back of the head of the person, he was shocked and stopped. Then, he gradually returned to the sleeping state.
Stillness of character in the environment
The same environment as the “stillness in environment” is used and a milk cow is added to the environment. Though the wind blew, the milk cow was just standing there in contrast with the floating clouds and the dancing crops.
Reflection
In the beginning, I thought animating the stillness in the environment means a picture. Nick showed us a looped animation of a pier where the reflected light on the water surface kept sparkling. Then, I started to understand that stillness in the environment is nothing happening in terms of narrative but something is happening in the environment.
In the last few weeks, I was animating my AI character and I experimented with different emotion expressions on facial expressions and the body gestures of the character. When I added the metamorphosis to the change in facial expression of the character, I felt it looked richer and better. Next, after I added the body gestures to the character, I thought it looked better as well. I began to have a thought of adding more to the animation will make it better. Through the theme of stillness this week, I learnt that too much happening at the same time will just make it look busy. Stillness/ pause in the animation is like a comma or a full stop in the sentence that allows the audiences to understand it better.
In my work, I can introduce pauses into the animation between each jump/ motion of the character to prevent it from getting too busy or look like a kid with ADHD.
Downloads:
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Download File: 1588837348_stillness-environment.gif
Download File: stillness-character-environment-v2.gif
Download File: character-stillness-whitebg.gif
