Reference Videos

In order to achieve a believable animation, we shot some LAV's (Live Action Videos) for reference. I find it really useful to be able to refer to videos when animating as I can be sure that I'm putting down the key poses in the correct way, also by recording these I am able to scrub back and forth through the video and really analyse how the body moves and what parts move when. As I am going to be animating the character I thought it would be best for me to act out the parts as I could get a better feel for it and understand her movements more. Animators are pretty much actors anyway, you need to be able to understand the movements of a specific character and the best way to do that is to act it out yourself.

Lija recorded a wide range of videos, the main actions / movements such as creeping, running, turning around etc, but we also did close up of the feet so I am able to really study these and make sure that the way our character walks is correct to how it is in real life. I quite enjoyed acting out the different parts but still need to get in the habit of doing this all the time with any animation I do. If I had more time as well I would have liked to break down the video into key shots where I could just refer to these when blocking out the animation, rather than scrubbing the video the whole time. Scrubbing the video is useful to see how the the poses move from one to another, but with the blocking stage of animation this isn't too necessary at the minute. I have uploaded a couple of videos with the links below.

Creeping Walk

Sitting Up