Performance Production

I feel I have succeded at creating believable and expressive performances for my characters, by implementing and considering newtons 3 laws of motion, and applying them in appropriate places. such as inertia when my character from challenge 2 leans on the table, the "inertia" of his body keeps moving slightly to create that overlap which is also "action and reaction" from newtons laws of motion.
I feel I have given a good demonstration of the 12 principles of animation, such as arcs and curves, especially in challenge 2 where he constantly whips his arm around and arcs his body.
I feel I have implemented advice from proffesionals and peers in an efficient and thoughtful manner such as James Baxter's and Ollie Trotman's advice on positioning weight of a character for challenge 2.
I feel I have succeeded in creating clean references, not just due to the chroma keying removing much of the visual background noise in the video, but also from framing myself well.
With Nur-karn helping film my reference, and me helping film reference for Darwin, and also asking, and giving feedback from classmates, it demonstrates good cooperation and teamwork, which is highly valued, as mentioned by many of our course lecturers, such as Paul Arion.
I feel I have improved greatly over last year's character mechanics module in terms of character movements, as I have managed to create greater finer detailed movements and paid more attention to areas such as fingers and weight distribution as compared to before. I have also gained more confidence working in the graph editor as a result of this.
I feel I have also done a much better job at showing my progress. As last year my tutor Sanjay said I did great work, but he said he would like to have seen more of my thought process and showing my development and stages along the way. This time I have shown many examples of how I have gone about my animation process, along with images, which is a big improvement over last time.

I feel I also still need work on my exaggeration in areas. I still feel there are moments when my character is stiff and lacks character. I could improve these areas by continuing to revise my acting classes notes and the methods we used to get into character, as well as reshooting references of me acting said moves.
I feel I still need work on facial animation. Although I was given praise on my lip syncing ability I was still left slightly unsatisfied with the result of my facial animation. Understanding and really getting a feel for the caveats of any rig helps to know how to use them, often areas of the face or head were lacking on control areas as we had a rather simplified rig. A combination of the contrast of the age of my character and the audio, alongside the limited amount of facial controls, alongside my slightly cautious and on the safe side of animation, resulted in a performance that did not quite wow me enough and left me itching for a little more time to work on it. It definitely worked and was readable and I was pretty happy but I just felt the face could have had more emotion and the body with a little more exaggeration. To improve this I would next time try to gather more references and get more inspiration from movies like Hotel Transilvania, which demonstrate an impeccable level of timing, arcs, ease in and outs, and line of action in animation.

Another thing I would do differently next time is keep the camera angle consistent while animating. Early on, I should pick a camera angle and stick to it. This helps me know exactly where the framing will be. In challenge 2, I was unsure about my camera angle. The character was facing two directions, so I didn't know whether to choose one side or put the camera at an angle. Because I didn't lock the camera in a single spot, I later moved it a bit and lost my good framing. Next time, I will just pick an angle and stick with it. This way, when I compare playblasts later for polishing, it will be easier to see just the differences in my character animation, without the changing of camera angles.