Short Story - Stop Motion

I was very excited when I found out about this exercise as it gave me a chance to be creative again such as I was with with the 'Block Interaction' in Animation 101, as I wasn't simply following an already established movement or principal, and instead was creating my own narrative. From the titles available I selected 'Dental Pain', as I felt it would be interesting to see how I could give the armature a nervous expression though it's actions and postures. 

The idea I had in mind was to have the armature worryingly pace about before impatiently sitting down waiting for his name to be called to see the dentist, followed by him/her praying pleadingly and shaking it's head disapprovingly after hearing a drill go off in the distance, ending with the armature look up as a dental nurse comes out and finally jumping out of his seat in shock as it hears it's name. 

I acted out what I had in mind myself which can be seen above, but unlike all the other video reference material, this was mainly used to analyse how a nervous mood would effect a persons movements, as well as getting a general idea of timings. I didn't feel the need to research about a specific cycle or principal this time, as I saw this exercise as a combination of all my learnings from the previous stop motion exercises, as I have it start off with a walk cycle, followed by a sit down, with the rest being emotions following other emotions, so from this I realise how essential those other animations were as they are all often typically applied within animation. From this video reference material, I drew up a bar sheet.

Bar Sheet Scan

I decided to instead produce this bar sheet with hand drawn illustrations as appose to digital illustrations, the reason being that I would be able to be more free with drawing the motions that I require, and as I've learnt from my previous bar sheets, digitally tracing around certain points from the reference material often resulted in the illustrations being although accurate somewhat unclear, so I though it would have been more beneficial to draw them as I want the armature positioned. Several elements were altered from this plan to the final animation which I will bring up later. As I am already familiarised with the walk cycle, I listed each key pose instead of illustrating them under the frame I wish them to appear. 

https://vimeo.com/217222527

This is the final result and I am very satisfied with how it turned out, although there are some minor quibbles which I will assure not to include in any similar animation in the future. I had never animated anything walking in anything else other than a straight line, so I was very pleased with how convincing and accurate I managed to animate the armature walking around aimlessly in a circle, the only thing I had to keep in mind, was that once the foot contacts the ground, it shouldn't move until it's lifted up, and the body tends to start turning before the legs. The pacing I feel was very well done, as it's got enough pauses and rests that the movement feels natural, but not too much that the activity looses that nervous and panicky feel. However, the things which I was not impressed with are as follows;

- I wanted to add a little bit of humour in the animation, which I tried to do by making the armature jump out of its seat at the end, however I feel that it may have come off as overly cartoony, which would have been fine if the rest of the animation were in a similar style, which it was not.

- Due to me slightly adjusting the path of the armature's wander whilst in production, it didn't reach the seat in timing, meaning I had to improvise the armature reaching out to the seat and pulling it closer, which turned out to be fairly decently animated, but I would have preferred for him to sit at his seat more naturally 

- The story wasn't entirely clear to the people who were shown this animation without the title, therefore next time I will ensure to add a few more clues into the performance about the context of the situation

Despite this, I am still satisfied to have this as my final short story, as I feel it communicates the emotion of the armature in this situation well.