NEXT-GEN Nescot Year 4 HND - Kibosh (Obstacle Course TV show) animation Sizzle reel

For my Kibosh animation, I started by creating a simple 3D scene using Maya, then created background scenery such as the floor-plane and the borders of a pool.

After creating the basic framework, I made the assets required to make the initial animation. I did this by compiling a series of different scenes centering around the same area with different obstacle courses above the pool I had created, before finally settling on bouncing balls.

This was because, as stated in my animation R&D blog post (https://tobymroberts.blogspot.com/2021/04/next-gen-nescot-year-4-hnd-kibosh.html), according to the brief for the project: learning the processes of animating characters and scenes, exploring the development of body and facial animations to portray a convincing performance through the use of animation and learning the process of animating characters and scenes. 

With the context that we are "working for the new research and development department at Third floor films" and the company has been approached by a new production management company seeking to branch into animation. As a result, for this project we were tasked with creating and presenting a brief TV ident, at a professional standard, for the upcoming (fictional) obstacle course show ‘Kibosh!’.

I also decided upon using 3D software for the creation of the animation, as it would have the widest appeal to the largest audience, while also allowing me to easily make changes and mimic the styles of other animation types simultaneously.

To complete this task, we were given a rigged character called "BeefCake" that would be used for the creation of our animations. Therefore, I added the rigged character to the scene, positioning and animating the character to jump between each obstacle I had placed.

In order to animate the rigged character, I started by moving the character's global controller from one side of the obstacle course to the other to simulate the character's movement. 

Then, I began individually moving different aspects of the character, such as the legs and arms to visually facilitate the movement of the character. Afterwards adding realistic muscle movements such as the shoulders moving back and forth and other actions to realistically animate the character's movements across the scene and add a sense of effort and determination from the character.

This is because in animals and humans, when a character's joints move the muscles and connected muscles flex and move to facilitate the movement for each part of the body, this is because muscles are attached to bone, making them responsible for the actions of each part of the body and their movement. 

As a result, nearly all movement in the body is the result of muscle contraction with very few exceptions. This is why the inclusion of muscle movements are important to the animation as it shows more fluid and realistic movement with more emotion in each action as it displays the character putting more effort into each action, rather than a more robotic, unconnected movement of editing the joints alone.

I also made the character's arms flail on the failed jump, shortly before hitting the final obstacle and falling into the water, in order to convey a sense of panic as they realize they have slipped. Though I failed to accurately show this with the character's feet movements.

I did this in order to convey the character's realisation and fear as they fell. This was to give the character more emotion as it conveys their thought process within a short amount of time, giving a more likeable feeling to the character and creating empathy from the audience.

Once the animation was completed, I created a few previsualisations for how the animation would look form separate angles. This was to experiment and visualise each position to pick the best location to render from, picking the location with the most view of the movements and more subtle actions that the character would act out.

As a result, this use of previsualisations allowed me to pick out my favourite filming position to be used in the final render.

While I was working on this, I also worked on the development of facial expressions to refine how the animated character could express emotion. This was done in After Effects and Photoshop, by creating images of different mouth movements and compiling them in an animation to mimic spoken words. 

This can be seen in my face rig blog: (https://tobymroberts.blogspot.com/2021/04/next-gen-nescot-year-3-hnd-kibosh.html)

While the character shown in my Kibosh animation does not have a mouth or eyes, the use of eyes and mouths in animation are incredibly useful to convey an animated character's emotion and exaggerate their actions.

This can be easily seen using different positioning's of the eyes and mouth, for example:

This image showcases the different positioning and expressions that can be created using a character's eyes. The first set of eyes acting as a control variable as each other set of eyes shows a different position and conveys separate emotions. For example:

• The second set of eyes clearly shows the emotive response of fear or shock through the use of shrunken pupils and lines underneath the eyes to facilitate panic or widened eyes. This is because in humans and animals pupils typically shrink when viewing something that the person or animal does not like and can easily be used to show that a situation is going against what the character wants, or to show that they are looking at something that they dislike or fear. Meanwhile, the use of widened eyes shows that they have an increased amount of stress, or that they cannot look away from what they can see.

• The third set of eyes shows anger or frustration due to the use of inward facing lines, which can be seen as substitutes for eyebrows. Thus, the inward facing lines mimic the expression of an angry and hostile character, especially if the character is humanoid in nature.

Simultaneously, the positioning of the mouth also shows clear emotion on a character's face. This can be seen on second layer, using only mouth expressions to clearly display emotion. For example:

• The first mouth expression conveys a sense of sadness or discomfort due to the mouth curving downwards into a frown, this shows a clear indication of sadness, especially for a human character.

• The second mouth expression shows an expression of happiness or contempt. Unlike the first expression, this mouth curves into a smile, clearly showing happiness, mostly once again on a human character.

Similarly, body language can also be used to convey emotion. This can be done through the use of movements, the character's speed or mannerisms and the combination of smaller movements such as moving or pointing hands to emphasise the characters speech, feelings or mood. For example:

• A character crossing their arms could be used to emphasise anger, discomfort, disbelief or an attempt to appear tougher.

• While another example would be a character flailing their arms around to convey confusion, fear or panic.

I attempted to show this form of emotional emphasis in my final animation through the various movements and actions the character made:

Overall, I believe that I did well with this animation, however, if I could change an aspect of the animation I would attempt to more accurately display that the character slipped on their last jump, in order to make the character falling more believable.