Below is the process I took to produce a piece of animation. I went along to the 11 Second Club site where they post an audio clip every month. This audio clip could come from anywhere, sometimes it's just sound effects. The challenge is to come up with your own interpretation.
When I had decided on a scenario I set my scene, camera angle and modelled a few props. Sometimes animators will act out the scene and film themselves, so that they get a good idea of body positioning and subtle expressions. This is recommended and very beneficial. In this particular case I did not act out the scene.
Blocking:
The blocking phase is the first phase I build when animating a scene. The
purpose of blocking out the animation is to work out the main story
telling poses of the characters, timing of the poses and framing of the
shot. I use Stepped keys so that when I play back the animation I just see the poses I've keyed.
Refining:
This phase is when the animated curves in my graph editor are
converted from Stepped to Spline. I will have to check the timing
between the poses again as the Stepped curves make the animation seem
very snappy from pose to pose, which can be desirable sometimes.
There will be a lot of finessing in order to refine this animation,
but a good blocking pass will mean that you have a good base to build
and refine your animation. Some of the finessing will include fine
tuning poses and timing and offsetting of body parts.
Polishing:
This is the final animation. Some of the things that were addressed were
tightening up the lip sync, adding in some finer facial features and
tweaking some of the timing.
