Idle Animation Attempt

This is the first of a few posts about the animations I did (or for the most part, attempted) to create. I tried to do at least three animations I could be proud of but unfortunately only got to submit one that was the best out of the lot. (Note, the blogs were created but the videos weren't - updated that recently)

While the others were not submitted - I do want to share with you my attempts on how I tried to get to grips with this process. Remember that this blog is just as much about my learning throughout this journey of gaining knowledge for animation.

So, the first thing I tried to do was create an Idle animation (or an animation for a character who would do an action when left for a long time). I wanted to convey that the character was nervous and shy. I found an image on-line that showed body language (click here for full image).

Fig 1: taken from the image available in the hyperlink above

(Fig 1) Picture above is taken from an image I found on deviant art and it depicts a character coming across shy. First thing that comes to mind is that the body is all hunched up together - shoulders are quite high up, the head is facing downwards, and her feet are pointing inwards.

I tried to do something that tried to give off the impression that my character was shy, but I wanted to add some movement to eat otherwise it'd be just standing there. So my thought process was observations I saw people do when they were shy or nervous. First thing that came to mind was the head - avoiding eye contact any time they could so I had my character have her head more over and over, I then thought maybe shifting the hips from side to side will give the character more life, and have the shoulder move up and down. The problem with this and the reason why it turned out to be a failure was because that instead of looking nervous and shy - it looked more like a dance more than anything and the legs didn't turn out that well either - they slide across the floor near the end..

I figured it be a good idea to put embed the video into the post - this way you can see just where I am getting at.

The thought was there but I realized that this is kind of going away from what I set out to do - if I wanted to look into body language and such I would of set out to do so at the beginning. Either way it's still stuff to blog about.