Getting into Character

One of the fun and challenging aspects of this type of project is coming up with a unique scenario to go with the audio. Sometimes the scene just pops into my mind and other times I've got to work hard to develop it.

For this 11 Second Club audio, 2 female characters were working through a situation.
These are some of the main points I needed to work out in order to come up with the animation:
-  Whats going through their heads as they reacted to the dialogue of the other character?
-  They go through emotional changes, what are they and what do they look like?
-  How do I compose the scene to best show the emotional changes and interactions.

I came up with these emotional/character traits for the characters which helped me compose the shot
Mom: authority, rule breaker, problem solver, confident
Girl: shy, nervous, inquisitive.

- View the final animation below -

Planning and executing an animated sequence

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.

Animating to an audio clip

I used the audio clip that was supplied by the 11 second club website to animate to. This was for the month of September 2010.