Alisha L Animation (LAU): Context of Practise 3: Berties' Line Tests

Context of Practise 3
Berties' Line Tests

I created a series of rough line tests for each of the characters to explore their personalities through body language.

I created a scenario where the character hears a glass shatter off-screen and then reacts to it according to their personalities. I thought that this would be a fun and interesting way to demonstrate this.
The first roughs I created allowed me to understand his body movement and effectively plan out the way he will react. I contacted artist and animator, Amelia Bothe on Instagram, about her process with animating. She isn't professionally trained in animation, but is self-taught and frequently animates at low frame-rates, yet is able to achieve well-timed and acted results. Here is her advice, after contacting her:

I followed the process for animating Bertie, similarly to how she described - planning out the keyframes and betweening them, deciding whether they need more frames or work well for the acting that way. I found that this method really helped me to focus on the acting of the characters, rather than creating a very fluid, but non-believable motion.
I started this process with Bertie:

I think that I was able to capture his personality really well with this first test, so I went ahead and lined his facial expressions and movements.
In my body language explorations, I explained that I wanted the focus to be on his expressions and chest movement, so this was my focus here when animating him. I did struggle at first to get into character, however, after keyframing him, I found inbetweening easier to do.

I, then, animated the body. I think the 12 Principles and acting were applied really well here, as you can feel the squash and stretch of his body as he puffs out his chest and leans back. This is something I wanted to achieve for this motion, to emphasise the chest-puff body language and his head going backwards, to look down a little bit at the camera.
I also believe that the eye movement and expressions work really well to demonstrate his grumpiness and arrogance. The flicker of the pupil, as he looks to the right and also the raising of the eyebrow demonstrates this. I was also proud of the arcing motion of the eye-roll.

To add a level of professionalism to the animation, I coloured, shaded and added a background. The glass shatter sound-effect was also added in the post-production.

Overall, whilst the acting works well for his character, I think I could have animated more to show his personality. This could be through another test, or using the tests to animate his full body. I did decide to use focus on the upper half of the body, to keep myself focused when animating, but next time I think I would try a full body movement, or with Sal or Mimo try a full body animation.
Despite the lower frame-rate to allow me to focus on the acting, I think it could have benefitted a lot from making it smoother. This is especially noticeable when he walks off camera, as the body isn't fully betweened. Next time, such as for Extended Practise, I will keep this in mind!

Alisha L Animation (LAU)