Artefact 3: Your Not Listening To Me

For Artefact 3 I have chosen to animate using a new rig that is known as ‘Moom’. It was the first time I had ever animated using this rig, at first I thought it was a little more challenging than ‘Morpheus’ but I picked it up quite easily after a while. I found Moom gave me more freedom to exaggerate and I instantly found that my character animating skills improved, allowing for a better performance.

Artefact 3 consisted of a sounds clip that I had taken from the ’11 Second Club’ I spent time selecting the right clip so that I could show a variety of emotions. The clip I chose uses a lot of emphasis on anger and shows a soft and sensitive side too. I found it easier to animate to a sound clip as my timing improved which allowed my key poses to flow together nicely.

Below you can see the final outcome of my third Artefact:

I received a lot of positive feedback from this artefact, the emotions were clearly conveyed through the body language and the facial expressions. However, I had feedback that I need to focus more on the line of action of the character and to find its power centre which is essentially it centre of gravity. I also received negative feedback about the amount of twinning (which is where the left and right side mirror the action taking place/work together) that I used. I should “only use twinning to emphasise an emotion.

For my next Artefact I am going to take the feedback I have received and apply it to the same sound clip and character but this time incorporate the line of action, power centre and only use twinning for emphasis. Hopefully, with these improvements I will be one step close to improving the overall performance of the character in order to find the level of exaggeration required to help convey emotion in an animated performance.

Overall I feel that I have produced a strong emotional connection with the audience and with the strong feedback I have received. I have also come to the understanding that the amount of exaggeration required depends on the style of character design/rig that you are using.