In this term, we got to learn three more of the animation exercises, which are body acting, facial acting, and lip-synch.
The first exercise that we do is body acting exercise. For this exercise, I was animating a lovely character, Shaheen, which was made by Renad. The first challenge while doing this exercise was how to make the decision of what the character is doing and how the movement will be like. As an overthinker, I feel like sometimes deciding on something took the longest part of the doing itself. So, for this exercise I tried not to choreograph the movement too much while I filmed myself for the reference and just go with the plot. I remember the final movement is referred based on a take where I accidentally knock over my electric kettle. Which create a genuine mood change to animate.
The next exercise is facial acting exercise. In this exercise I animated a character receiving a call. The mood change that is happening in this animatic is bored-flustered-angry. I realised while filming this that I got super panicky when I filmed that resulted in too much movement for many of my reference video. I was glad that I am able to decide what part of movement to cut and make the movement clearer. But maybe I do need more acting lessons to make sure I do a good reference.
The last exercise that we did in this term is Lip-synch exercise. Which consisted of two exercises. The first one, I got to animate a character with the voice of my classmate, Vivi. And the second one is an animation with the voice from old Vine video. In this exercise (especially the first one) I tried to experiment with my TV Paint workspace. While doing the first exercise, I tried to separate all body parts layer, because my mind suddenly just thought that maybe it was a good idea (It was not). It resulted in a very messy workflow and tiresome revisions, so I decided to redo everything. In the second try, I only separate the layers into three (mouth, body, hair) so I could work much neater than the first try. In the second exercise, I still separate the layers into too many layers, but because it was only 6 second, I didn’t get as overwhelmed as I felt on the first one when doing the revisions. So, the simpler, the better. For the character’s movement itself, again, I think I haven’t successfully animated a natural acting for my character.
For me personally, all three exercises were really challenging, and I think I especially struggle with the acting part. I feel like when it comes to the technicality, I notice improvement in my grasp of understanding and creating the animation, but I still think my animation tend to look stiff when it comes to how they move. But overall, I still enjoyed every process. As stressful as the process was, to see how every frames you drew move as a whole animation was always worth it, and it gave you reason to move forward and keep learning.