EYE MASK PROJECT
This was my second project in our Advanced Character Animation class during the Fall of 2023. I went through multiple different animation iterations and changes to how I see reference and the world. I ended with 71 Maya incremented files and at least 6 or 7 different feedback loops from my professor. This project had awkward requirements. We had to frame the face without the mouth so we could focus on the animation of the nose, cheeks, eyebrows, eyes, and ears.
ITERATION #1
I used an audio clip from the Netflix show, "Peaky Blinders". I found this audio clip to hold a lot of emotion between two characters which was really fun to animate but it became a struggle very quickly as I didn't have a firm grasp on the fundamentals of character animation yet so there were a ton of mistakes and learning opportunities throughout this project. This first iteration was really focused on the surprised expression that comes from our character.
ITERATION #2
Although the first iteration was alright, there was a lot of notes from my professor that allowed me to improve my animation. Some of these notes were to stop talking with the head and have the character talk with their mouth. This caused the character to move their head a lot less and it became less distracting for the viewer. During this iteration, I focused on the eye darts, blinks, eye movements, and cheek movements.
ITERATION #3
For this iteration, I still had too much head movement which made the animation look a little bit strange. I smoothed out the animation and made changes so that the character didn't talk with their head. This is important as it can create a really bad looking animation when the character is constantly moving their head from side to side. There is too much motion and it can become distracting, especially in a slow and emotional scene such as this one.
ITERATION #4
The main challenges that I had with this iteration is that the movement of the character looking downwards was too fast and jittery so I went through and needed to slow it down a little bit. The timing was a bit off and I needed to make sure that it didn't appear as if this character was doing the voices for both the male and female parts of the clip. Also I worked on a bunch of refining details such as the eyebrows and the hair.
ITERATION #5
This is the version of the project that I turned in for a grade and I am pretty happy with how it turned out. I know I can definitely fix and refine some of the animation such as the hair and some of the eye movements. I think I could also make the eyebrows along with the eyes seems a little bit more realistic with some movements such as follow through some of the elements. I also want to fix some of the animation on the ears as it looks like they move a little bit too much and they become distracting while watching this shot.