Animation - Personal Project

I've recently been finishing off an animation I was doing as a personal project. As I had been doing a lot of animation with male characters, I wanted to have a go at animating a female. I decided to use the female mod of malcolm as I'm quite comfortable with it and wanted to see what I could achieve. I took the sound clip from 'My Best Friend's Wedding' as I really liked the tone of voice and thought I could play around with expressions a bit more.

Coming from my 11 Second Club entry in August, I tried to improve my animation and the flow of all the movements. I've paid a lot more attention to the whole body this time as back in April I realised that I just focused on the top half of the body. When one part of our body moves, it has an affect on other adjoining bones, so I made sure that there was movement throughout the body but in a subtle way. As always I took reference videos to help plan out my animation and made sure I created a thorough blocking pass before moving onto splining. The splining process, I did a bit at a time so it was more manageable and this way I could concentrate on each section and really try and polish them off. I've been trying to understand more about the graph editor, overshooting keys and breaking tangents to get more subtle changes between each motion. There's still a lot more I feel like I don't know and what I really want to try next is more exaggerated animation. The animations I've done so far have been quite realistic in the way I've followed my own reference almost exactly. I need to try and break away from this and really push the poses some more and go a bit more over the top with it.

The animation that is below is almost complete - I had already uploaded it to Vimeo as at the time I thought my file had corrupted and wasn't able to complete it to the extent I wanted to. Turns out it is fine now so I'm planning to go back to it and edit the eye darts, lip sync and render it out fully so it is showreel worthy.


Dumbest Thing from Siobhan Parkhouse on Vimeo.