I started to animated quite late in the term for this project as the rig wasn't ready until then. All of the environment was modeled, it was just needing the animation to finish it up! I had two shots for this. One was a long shot of the little girl skipping though the museum and the other was of her tapping a rocket and satellites falling off.
The first shot I tackled was the tapping shot. This was the first time I had properly animated with the rig, but I had played a round with the controls beforehand a little bit. I used the animatic to get rough timings and then I went and animated it. This was my first draft, but Rory wanted me to change it because the motion of her looking up and down again was too quick and looked a bit vicious and out of place:
First draft:
Here is my re-worked animation which I am much happier with and so is Rory:
After this shot I moved onto my second shot of her skipping though the museum. I had never done a skip cycle before so I really didn't know what to do. The first one I tried I completely flopped and it ended up as a big mess because I tried to animate her main control going forwards, then her body up and down and then try to get her feet in time with that but i gave up on that after a day of failure! I searched though my books and found a section in "the animators survival guide' by Richard Williams. He saves the day again! I got the basic movements and poses from his drawings and then adapted it to the girl. I didn't want it to be a very high skip as she is only small, but I wanted it to be quite bouncy still. Here is what I came up with:
Rough blocking/spine animation:
I then went in to polish it up and get it moving forwards and here is the final playblast! (excuse the floating tongue, it is now fixed!):
This is a render I have done of just the skip finished. The final scenes aren't rendered yet as they are skill being lit and in production but I also have two renders of a frame from each scene I animated on to show the quality of the final film:
Shot 1:
Shot 2:
