Honour's Project: Animation practices

After much thought and feedback for which path I will take as my 4th year study. I've come to the decision to focus on character acting and performance, the aim is to develop a showreel showcasing character performance from studies and animation disciplines through research and practical research.

Last week I created a very rough blocked out animation from storyboards I designed. Although the animation is very rough the aim was to focus on timing, pose to pose and clear silhouette form.

While researching animation techniques I came across a maya tutorial which described the use of the "Editable Motion trail". This feature allows the user edit the motion graph in a 3D space as to oppose a separate motion graph window.

A link to the tutorial: http://www.digitaltutors.com/tutorial/1176-Introduction-to-Animation-in-Maya#play-28620

Honour's Project: The 4th year at University

The final year at university has arrived, this year I've been given creative freedom to choose what I want to do as my honers project.

For this I've chosen two routes to go down. These two project revolve around animation,

Idea one will involve creating a showreel which demonstrates character acting and performance. For this I plan to research into animators to learn theories and techniques they use to create a convincing character performance. For my final submission I plan to create a demoreel which demonstrates my practices and lessons in animation. By creating a showreel not only will it be a stepping stone into animation but I will have something to showcase my skills.

Idea two is creating an animated short. The aim is to design and create a short film which uses visual narratives to convey a story over to the viewer; this will be made using animations software. 

For research I plan to look into directors both film and animation, from the research gathered I hope to have a knowledge and understand of film techniques and theories on visual narratives to create a short film.