Journal of an Art Student: Week 6 Day 1 : Production

I made a plan for the up-coming next two weeks which consisted of finishing the most difficult scenes in the first week, followed by the easier scenes. I would work on creating the sounds for my animation in the final few days.

Over the weekend I started to animate some of the most drastic scenes such as the metamorphosis and eating scene. I thought that these were quite hard to animate as in my opinion as they focused on facial expressions. Strangely I found it easier to animate the characters bodies rather than their facial expressions. However it is the facial expressions is what mainly gives life to each character.

Also I realised that I made a huge mistake while I was creating the Marcus character designs when I created an arm I made it as one whole symbol and so I could not animate it properly. I didn't realise that when you create a character you need to follow the human anatomy and so have 3 different joints for an arm in order for it to move properly. I then had to recreate different parts of Marcus' body such as the arms and legs. I have learnt from this time consuming mistake and I shall never do it again.

I also experimented using the bone structure tool to see if I could animate my character that way. I was not pleased with the result because the way the character moved didn't align with my notion of his character. It was too smooth and I wanted him to move in a more jagged way. I decided to animate him the longer way which meant that I would be more satisfied with my end result and pleased with the way in which he moves.