OUAN603 - Animation References

There were several scenes where it became necessary to produce and ultilise references in order to produce certain animated sequences. In particular, the walking scene that opens the animation as Takahiro walked into the kitchen was quite difficult to handle because this was the first sequence I was animating and I wanted to establish a good style of animation here to work off for the rest of the animation. This scene was also difficult because the characters legs, or where they would be are obstructed by the table in the foreground, so without reference it would be trying to work out where their body would be without being able to see the movement of their legs. I did consider drawing a normal walk cycle and then erase it but instead opted to film some reference material. This was perhaps necessary anyway because I wanted an exaggerated walk and not standard pace or style. I tried to keep the level of character in the movements as high as possible without being too unrealistic.

I filmed a short video of myself walking across the camera in a way that was as close to the angle of the camera in the animation as reasonably possible; I then made several attempts at different walks until I had one that replicated the type of emotion the character was feeling after just waking up and walking into the kitchen, tired, slow, low energy for example. Following on from the success of referencing the walk, I took reference footage of the next scene, which was the cutting of the tofu on the chopping board. This again proved to be hugely helpful when animating as oppose to doing it from imagination, which would have been considerable less accurate overall

This is perhaps one of the first times I have used references to produce animation and it made a huge different to both the ease of the sequence and the quality of the out come. Aside from the benefits it had within the animation, this was a useful lesson in the importance and advantages of reference material when creating animated sequences.