Walk cycle barsheet and reference video

This will be the reference video for my stop motion exercise.I had reduce the speed so viewers can see the movement of the feet clearly. 

As I observed the video above, I noticed that the average time of each step is around 2 seconds. Therefore,  the total armature video will take 8 seconds that include 2 seconds hold.

Reality is always crueler than planning. When I started animate the armature, the timing is too quick and it felt so wrong. There are several faults in the video, firstly, timing. The armature walked too fast, which completely different from my barsheet. Secondly, the distance between toe and heel is not right as well. Thirdly, the staging is horrible as the viewer can not see the waving arms at all. 

The walk still looks very odd but slightly better this time. When left foot step forward, the other foot seemed slide backward, which look like Micheal Jackson's dancing step.  I don't know the reason yet but I will do more practice to get a better walk cycle later. I am happy with my progress as first time I did a terrible video without timing and spacing, but this time, I'm getting improving.

Puppet Making

Alice had completed the basic puppet in last few weeks and it looks fantastic. I love the shape of the body, she's very skinny but characteristically. We decided to paint together, to make the puppet more real. 

I really like her hair as the red colour made her more recognizable. We got this idea from a television program character (I don't know the name of her), it inspired us of creating a strongly feature of a character, so audiences can remember it easily. 

We intended to paint her dress in brown but it did not work well, because she looked bloody and violent, which is not what we aimed for. Therefore, we painted blue over the brown and it looked slightly better. Although we are not satisfy with the dress, but we got some experience of puppet making and basic colour theory. 

Location Research

 To get a better understanding of horror atmosphere, I went to South Cemetery to take some photography of real gravy. 

There are hundreds and thousands of gravies in the graveyard.

There was a church that filled with western style and I though it would be great to utilize it on the background.

Background Composition

Today, I have finished the all the background effect and exported them into a video. During the process of adding effect, I met several technical problems and it had stressed me out. For instance, I could not move the CC light ray follow along the moon, I attempted to make the moon bright and shinny so it would make the whole background looks fantasy and mysterious, but I failed on the area of move the light ray. 

Another problem that annoyed me was that the final video looks desultory, especially when the moon's rising up the sky and rotating itself, it seems like paused video that makes intermittent video quality. 

Then, I tried to export the video in format of  mp4. and this time the video plays very smoothly, but the video colours looks slight darker and duller. 

Statement of Ine

I decided to choose The Body Language in the character design as the topic for the essay. 

Gibbs Reflective Cycle

• I've chosen the body language in the character design as the topic for the essay
• I felt it will be easy to find lots of resources or other references materials because anthropologist has been studying the human behaviors for long time and has been publishing a lot of relevant books.
• the good thing about chosen this topic is I can learn more acknowledges about body language and gain more understanding about the importance of gesture and poses in the animation. However, this is wild topic that contains lots of information, I better have to narrow down the field I am going to write in order to make a effective essay.
• to narrow down the subject, I should read the general content of the body language and choose the specific area to write
• I could also get recommend from other people such as tutor or friend to help me with specific subject
• if the problem rise again, I would do some research such as read the content of the book first, and then choose a specific area to study.

Walk cycle

In animation, a walk cycle is a series of frames or illustrations drawn in sequences that loop to create an animation of a walking character. A good walk cycle is very important to the character as it indicates the personality and features of the character. 

The image above is the walk cycle reference from The Animators Survival Kit by Richard Williams. You can see the method he used is key pose to pose where he had drawn five key poses: contact, down, pass position, up and contact again. These five key poses are the essential of a walk cycle, with this you can create a fluently walking character.  

Emotion to Emotion Exercise

Gibbs Reflective Cycle

• This is emotion to emotion exercise. I've picked joyful and scary as two emotions of armature going to present.
•  I felt unsatisfactory about the final video I've done because it did not show the joyful clearly. People would confused of the action armature firstly did. I attempted to make it applaud and laughing while standing up, then cover the eyes, sit back again. The pose should clearly communicate to the audience the mood, but my armature did not pose well which confused the audience about what he's doing.
• The good thing is I presented two poses, joyful and scary in the stop motion animation. Nonetheless, the pose of joyful wasn't been presented clearly.
• I could apply the principle Staging in the video. Staging directs the audience's attention toward the most important elements in a scene in a way that most effectively tells the story.
• I could also make a better joyful pose such as jump up or lean backward to show the happiness.
• If this problem rise again, I would make stop motion few more times.