Animating Emotions

This week's motion studies task was to have a character go from one emotion to its opposite emotion. I chose to go from sadness to happiness. 

We had to try and create a performance and were told we could either be over the top or subtle in the character's acting. I decided to go for a more subtle approach as my previous weight lift animation was fairly over the top.

Here's my LAV (the fancy new word we have for reference video):

I wanted to try out doing a sad walk as up until now I've only animated a 'vanilla' walk and WOW walks are hard!! I think I did pretty well on the first two steps, but then I thought it would be a good idea to emphasize the down position more (I'd noticed that in a sad walk there's very little up and down movement, but the biggest change is on the down position, so I thought, hey i might as well emphasize it!) and this didn't work out too well. It just looks a bit weird. I probably should have done more to emphasize the dragging of the feet, as this is probably the most defining characteristic of a sad walk. The sigh could've also used more frames to make it bigger and smoother.

Buuuuuuut I was really happy with how the jump and the twirl came out, as I have never turned a character round before and I was surprised I pulled it off! This was also the first time I've put facial features on a character. For the sad walk I drew the features on on a separate run, but this was difficult and more time consuming than just drawing it on when i drew each figure. The facial features definitely add a lot to the character though.