11 sec club...

So...having had a bit of feedback on my work for the 11 second club so far, I realised there are a particular few things that I needed to change/work on/ think about a little more before I went any further with the animating.

As I wanted to make my character pretty huge, it may be quite a challenge to animate well and create a lot of movement, especially movement that is fitting for his size and exaggerates it.
So I did some better live filming with various people dressed up stuffed with pillows to use as reference. This did help as I could see straight away how their movements changed compared to when they just acted out the same scene normally.
I continued to draw and work on the character, making him a bit simpler and pretty much just a big round ball to animate with. So I did a few more character design pages and one to get the general look of the scene in which he will be placed.












I also thought a little more about the movement of the character. As the speech is obviously limited to 11 seconds I found it was hard to get all the movement I wanted to into such a short space of time without him moving really fast as this wouldn't suit such a large character. Also if too much movement is put into 11 seconds it could just look rushed and you can't really see what is happening.

I then considered how the animation would look altogether and I realized that all the action happens in the same scene and it would be refreshing to maybe focus in on the characters face where I can really concentrate on the lip sync and facial expression. So I changed the camera angle to zoom in to a mid shot of the character.

So I story boarded out very roughly where I wanted the character and found it really helpful using my dope sheet to get the timing right. I also drew out the main key poses for the character.


Having done this I worked from the dope sheet and made an animatic to get the timing and movement I wanted right. I did this bit by bit, working on different scenes of movement, and making changes each time where necessary...


The result so far....



I think the way the scene goes together works quite well and the movement of him sitting down and laying on the sofa worked much better then I thought it would. I think I still need to work on these areas however and play around with the timing to emphasize the character's size and effort to move in such a way. The zoom in improves the flow of the scene and I will definitely keep this in. It also gives me a chance to do some lip sync. At the end the character points towards the empty cans/bin and I need to add this on the end...I may put this in between him pointing, and where he flops back down onto the arm of the sofa and it would join it in with the piece a little more, rather then adding it onto the end almost like an afterthought.