Final Year Begins

Hey there, I'm back to university for my last and final year, ecstatic and worried at the same time (chuckle). Before I return though, we were asked to write up a proposal for which we could negotiate with our tutors. This can be anything, from stop-motion, 2D animation and so on. If you've been following this blog, you've noticed that I've been trying to become a 3D animator and thats exactly, what my proposal will be based on.

For this project of mine, I'm hoping to be able to animate a character with an audio file, where I will try and put it in a situation, which it will try and overcome. At the same time, I really want to make the audience empathise with the character.

My tutor will elaborate further about this project, so what I'm typing up right now, may change but, I doubt it would change significantly with what I have planned out. So, my learning outcomes would be the following:

- to give a believable performance, through inner impulse emotions
- to produce a theatrical short with my character
- to be able to lip-sync my character very fluidly
- to make my audience feel empathy with my character

Over the past summer, I know I've struggled with learning how to animate and I still do; evidently my side project for the 11 second club. Though you can't be successful after a few tutorials as it takes time (years......), I realise where my strengths comes into play when working on an animation.

 I can analyse the graph editor which used to look like a mathematician would only understand and remove any dead keyframes that are visible.  I could apply most of the animation principles e.g. secondary action, anticipation to the character. Can't really think anymore with my strengths, as I don't really like saying what I do know, as though I'm boasting so...I'm going to leave it as that.

To ensure that I'm able to hit all of my learning outcomes, I'd need to do several things such as:

- continue reading on animation theories and look at case studies (previous animation)
- do a handful of small tests with audio files
- attend to live performances e.g. theatres so that I can capture real life situations of characters and see their expressions.
- learn more tutorials of how to animate in 3D software
- produce an effective storyboard for extreme poses for the character as well as live reference

Going to be interesting

Well, I guess thats it. I've been under the radar this whole month more or less, as I ran into a few problems, when I started animating myself for the 11 second club, for this current month. I then, knew that something was wrong with it, so I decided to focus on reading the books which I've purchased during the summer and it's definitely paid off, as it had helped me type this proposal up as well as planning on future animations. So, I'll see you next time!

AndyCodex Animation