Character And Narrative: Strike a Pose

In the 'Character and Narrative' module we got given a study task to do, which was all about the body language, acting and how important it is to animation. We started off the session by having a presentation on how animation needs reference so the animators can portray emotion in their animations, they do this by acting out what they want and use the footage to help understand human emotion and body language can be a big part of exaggerating emotions. The presentation showed us footages of Charlie Chaplin's silent movies, and other black and white films which uses body language to portray emotion because there was no sound at the time. This was really useful to me because it taught me how using the body to exaggerate emotion in animation can be a big part of experiencing the film/animation.    

For the study task we had to pose in multiple positions which show emotion, then using the demo character we got last session create the same emotion in maya. This was really fun to do because not only did we have to think about the positions we had to think about the lighting and the angles of the camera, this was so that we could intensify the emotions even more. I feel like I've done a good job portraying the emotions into the 3D characters, but I would of liked it better if I had just changed the colour or material of the character so that it looks more entertaining to the eye. I'd also like to thank Max and Matt for being my models because they gave me great reference material to work with.  

Character and Narrative

In the first session of are new brief we went through the module and criteria of what we needed to do, and how we could apply new skills to are animations. For are first module we have to create a 3D animation which teaches us how to rig and put a skeleton in a 3D model in Maya 2015, and we have to bass the characters off of nine different titles we were given which are: Happy Days, Leap of Faith, Predator and Pray, Opposites Attract, Road to Nowhere, The Message, Last Chance, Adrift, and Rivals.

For the first half of the day we talked through the module and what was expected from us, and we also talked about the brief, what we have to do, how we can model a 3D character and what we needed to do to pass the module. For this module we have pair up into teams of two and create a character each in one animation which should last for a minute.

  Throughout the first half of the day we got into pairs and started generating ideas for four of the titles Oscar (my partner) and I liked the best. Are ideas are mainly comedy based because thats what we're best at and we'll have fun doing it.

 In the second half of the days session we went on maya to have a look at how to make a character move, and how rigs and skeletons work. We also looked at how to manipulate characters moving and different positions. I found this easy to do because I've already had some practice with characters before. However, creating the actual character will be quite interesting because the first character I created wasn't a success.  




We also experimented with UV mapping and texturing the model. Doing this was a simple task because as I said before I've already been experimenting in maya and I already know how to do this kind of thing. But throughout this module I will learn a lot more to do with maya so I'm looking forward to that.