Artefact 5: Exaggeration To Represent Mass

My final Artefact uses the character/rig ‘Moom’ again. I animated ‘Moom’ this time to push a box, I wanted to show how the characters emotions and reactions help to exaggerate the imaginary mass of an object.

Again, using line of action, the power centre and twinning I will be able to use the character emotions to give the illusion of weight to a box. By making the character struggle I was able to add emphasis on this which place an important part in this animation.

Below you can see my final Artefact:

The feedback for my final Artefact wasn’t as positive as my fourth Artefact but the focus group I held told me that my key poses were strong although the animating technique wasn’t as strong as my previous Artefacts. They also gave me further feedback that sound would help to enhance the performance as it would be easier to believe. So although we are meant to do five artefacts I am going to add sounds for my own satisfaction to see whether this can help to enhance character emotions.

Overall this animation shows exaggeration can be used to give the illusion of mass to an object through the character emotions. To conclude this Artefacts along with the others the level of exaggeration truly relies on the character design and the personality it is attempting to portray. This animation shows the key importance of line of action and the power centres of a character as well as the emphasis of twinning. Another valid point I have come to understand is that the character design plays a vital role as to how much exaggeration can be used before going beyond the capabilities of the rig.

Artefact 4: Your Not Listening To Me Improved

Artefact 4 is quite simply an improvement of Artefact 3. This time I have reanimated the character but have incorporated the line of action, the power centre and only used a technique known as twinning as and when necessary to place emphasis on an action which will enhance the characters emotion. In order to do all of this more hyperextension was to add more exaggeration.

A clear example of this can be seen in a few examples below:

The feedback that was given back for this Artefact was extremely encouraging as I sat down with a few course mates on other pathways to ask them what they thought about the level of exaggeration used. The responses I received were comments that proved my previous artefacts were pointing me in the correct direction. From the results I collected showed that the audience felt a strong connection with the character, they believed the character performance and could clearly tell what emotion the character was feel at any point in time. They also commented on the emphasis of the anger near the end of the clip where twinning was used.

For my final Artefact I want to use no sound and use a weighted object to show how the connection between a character an object can show mass through the character body language and facial expressions, this can mainly be done through key poses, line of action and most importantly the characters power centre.

Overall I am extremely pleased with the outcome of this Artefact, it shows a stronger performance than the others, which shows the importance of exaggeration when conveying emotion. It also shows the importance of how using hyper extension correctly with a strong line of action and knowing the characters power centre is vital.