Emotion to Emotion - Stop Motion

Above is the primary reference material which I utilised for the making of my second armature animation. After concluding in my previous stop motion blog post that I felt I should have performed and recorded the actions myself in order to emphasise certain movements and get my personal vision across easier, I done so with the primary material for this particular animation. I performed the actions in front of a mirror so that I can see the actions as I am doing them. For the shocked emotion, I stiffened my body to make the pose appear more tense for the shocked emotion, and relaxed my body for the relieved emotion.

From this video, I was then able to create a bar sheet where I simply illustrated key poses within the video, and then placed them beneath their according key frames, assisted by the timings on the original video. The faint lines between each pose on the chart illustrate the type of motion path which I feel suit the movement in between the key frames, for example, 'slow in, slow out'. This was something that was lacking from my initial stop motion animation, so hopefully this will help improve the quality of the animation.

https://vimeo.com/207766445

This is the result of my second stop motion with an armature, which was assisted by the primary research above. I felt as though during this animation, I have improved upon the handling of the armature itself, as in the previous animation I found it to be very fiddly and I couldn't accurately position the armature in between frames, which hopefully shows in this following animation. The emotions which I used in this animation were shocked to relieved, as I felt they were emotions which would realistically follow eachother, and both can be portrayed in distinct key poses. The poses which I made with the 'Buckid' rig in Maya really helped, as variants of both emotions were imitated with the rig, providing good material to base the key poses on. I feel that the result of this animation is a lot more 'cartoony' and exaggerated than my 'Stand up, Sit down' animation, which may likely be due to the reference material. However, this works in the animations favour, because I am trying to give emotion to a figure which lacks any facial expression, therefore in order to really communicate the expressions, I will have to exaggerate the poses somewhat. The story behind this animation which I had in mind when animating, was the armature was watching a motorbike accident, which shocks him, but is then relieved when he sees the victim is okay, however due to the abstract nature of the animation, I'm sure others will easily be able to interpret their own stories into the animation, such as names are being called on a register, the armature thinks he hears his name, before realising it's not. With the initial jump, I included a 'follow-through' technique, which worked a lot better than it did in my previous animation, and helps make the expression become more recognisable. There is one thing which I am disappointed about however, and that is the positioning of the feet on the armature, as they seem to aimlessly jiggle about at times, and I see their being two main causes of this; 1. in the reference material I did not alter the vantage point so that the feet are visible, therefore I had to assume how they'd realistically move, so next time I'll make sure to include my whole body in the reference material, and 2. I was primarily focused on the upper-body movement, as that is where the expression is typically shown, therefore the feet may have been nudged without my realisation, which is something which I will definitely work to prevent in the next animation. Overall though, I am very pleased with the result of my second armature animation, as the movements are smooth and the expressions are clear.