From TV to films to video games, animation has great power to bring characters and stories to life. But in order to do this effectively, the animation has to believable. Whether it’s the physics on a bouncing ball, or the way someone’s mouth moves when they’re talking, getting the movements right is paramount to getting the audience to see the character as a living, breathing entity with feeling and emotions.
In these demo reels, I animated a variety of different objects and characters to create believable animation sequences. This included everything from simple bouncing ball animations to walk cycles, idle animations, full action sequences and lip syncs. Creating these animation required a solid understanding of physics and how objects and people move, as well as the subtle details which add personality and character and the 12 principles of animation.
Creating believable animation takes a great deal of time and effort. To create most of my animations required research, where I would collect a good reference video (or make a good reference video, as was done for the lip sync in the video above) I could base my animation on. After doing this, the next stage was familiarising myself with the rig, and then ‘blocking in’ the major extremes or key movements in the reference. From here, I added in the inbetween frames until I had a basic ‘first pass’ animation of the movement or concept I was going for (eg. in the lip-sync animation, this would have involved opening and closing the jaw). After this, it was a matter of adding more and more detail in multiple additional passes by animating the smaller parts (eg. in the parkour reference, this would have involved animating the hands, toes, and eventually the individual fingers). This was by far the longest part in the process. The last animation stage was the clean up stage, where I adjusted individual frames and added little elements which would make the animation more believable (eg. animating the tie in the lip syc when the character leans forward).
After this, it was a matter of framing the shot by positioning the camera (or animating the camera in some cases), lighting the scene, and adding any background objects or props needed for the actual animation or to set the scene.
