Week 5



I wanted to continue with character expressions this week, so I continued with parts from the beginning of the animation. As usual, most of the frames were already produced from the animatic. It just became a case of cleaning up the lineart, adding a few in between and then colour!

While working on this, I didn't really like the flow on the antagonist's clothes, it felt somewhat clumsy, and it all moved at the same time, giving it a somewhat artificial look, which I wanted to avoid as best as I could. After some deliberation, I decided to cut this part of the animation for the time being, and redo it from scratch at a later date. 

To aid with the in-between of this animation, I filmed my own hand performing the same motion, and used that as a reference, so that the animation would feel as smooth and realistic as possible. Using reference and even filming yourself is something used incredibly regularly in the industry so it would be foolish not to employ this to aid my work. 




Moving onward, I jumped back to the latter parts of the animation. The goal of this clip was to show the characters expressions, and also to show thew "close quarter nature" of the punch. This was done with the use of extreme close-ups, and the characters taking up the entirety of the frame, giving the composition of the shot a sense of claustrophobia.



As with many of the animatic shots involving the antagonist. The lineart for the character needed to be redrawn to match the quality of the rest of the animation. The proportions and complexity of the character were often hard to replicate over and over again, and also the use of armour made the character hard to draw consistently. If I were to redo the project, I would reconsider the complex nature of his design. This is on hindsight, somewhat ironic considering that the original design was going to be even more complex than what is being drawn here. In future, I will build a better database of references to work from when drawing unique and non-human characters in my animations. 


It is about this point in the animation that the music cuts out, as the protagonist character realises that she has made a mistake. To help further this concept, I added an additional reaction shot from her, that helps drive home this feeling. There may be some concern that this shot may break the flow of the action, however, I feel that this is the purpose of the shot. In addition, while there wouldn't be time for this shot in real life, the artistic license that comes with animation allows for certain moments like this, if it builds upon what came before it. 


I am happy with the dynamic camera angles in this clip, which follow the action closely and hopefully convey the themes I wanted it to portray. 




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