Applied Animation: Documentary - Fenrir Keyframes

Applied Animation

Documentary - Fenrir Keyframes and Betweens

• This week:
• I worked on the keyframes and inbetweens for Fenrirs' scenes.
• What went well:
• As the scene I was working on was a mix between frame-by-fame animation and puppet animation, I was able to expand my knowledge on using Toon Boom Harmony for this workflow. 
• I worked in a specific workflow, which allowed me to key-frame and map-out each section of Fenrirs' body and then work on each part one at a time. This made the animation both consistent and worked effectively with keeping the movements of his body in sync with each other.
• In order to make Fenrir as "animated" as I could, I focused on creating secondary animations and paid more attention to detail, within the scene, which makes the overall shot much more interesting.

Quick Environment Test to understand scale

Some additional layers of animation, with the tail and breath:

• For the breath animation, I used a reference from YouTube of steam coming from a coffee cup, and paused the video every few seconds. This helped understand the flow and movement. This can be found here:

Initial keys and betweens:

• Some feedback from this shot I received from my group was that the additional blink towards the end of the turn felt too jarring and needed to smooth it more and have his eyes just slowly open, so I adjusted and re-drew these frames.

Improved/Smoother Head Turn:

• I, then, worked on the chains and rock for the scene. I did these similarly to the body, with puppet animation and pegs, in Toon Boom. 

• One thing that I had developed on from previous scenes is my line-work, as I struggled with this initial with Jormungandrs' scenes. As I have come to understand the software better, this problem is easier to resolve.

• What could be improved:
• One thing that needs to be worked on for the rest of this week is making sure the steam from his breath is adjusted to be more accurate. I will have to explore more ways to do this after I have coloured it, but that could be adjusting the opacity or adding a blur effect.
• I have additionally noticed that the tail flick is masked by the action of Fenrirs' head turn, so I want to find a better time for the flick to occur so that it is more noticeable when audiences view it.
• Next week:
• I will be working on the colouring and any improvements I have stated this week!