Animation exercises

Currently I am doing a few animated pieces. Nothing massive, just a few segments with motion and some lip sync bits with short soundbytes of about 10 seconds. The plan is to get some more decent tests that show off my animation skills with my finished stock rig (although this still has a few bugs. However this is why reference files are so handy. I can fix the original character rig, which is then updated in the animated scene)

One lip sync is using the Blake rig I have been raving about, which is pretty motion-heavy as it is due to the content being pretty enthusiastic. However, I've been stripping this down a lot to as few poses as possible. One reason is that the piece would eventually become a mime, and although body language is expressible, nobody really acts out every single word, and the whole lip sync gets very cluttered. Stripping the whole piece down to a couple of strong poses has a much better effect.

I am also using a couple of Muybridge's sequence of images as handy reference for motion. Once these sets of poses are established, I can then exaggerate arm swings, head motions and such to really bring some life to an otherwise natural action.

Sorry for the short post, hopefully I'll be able to put up some WIP when they are more polished.