Month: April 2026

Breathing Animation

This week was a workshop week, and the class was held remotely due to the tube strike on this week. During the workshop, I created an animation shot focusing on a character breathing cycle. The character had a unique design that resembled a snake, with a long tail, a long tongue, and spikes along its back. Because of these features, it was an interesting character to animate.

During the session, our tutor demonstrated the workflow for creating a breathing animation step by step. The clear explanation helped me understand the process much better and gave me a deeper understanding of how to approach this type of animation. What I found most exciting was seeing how much life a simple breathing motion could add to a character. At the beginning, the character was completely still and felt lifeless, almost like a statue. However, after adding the breathing animation, the character suddenly felt alive and believable. It was fascinating to see how such a subtle movement could have such a strong impact.

From a technical perspective, I also applied overlapping action to different parts of the character, including the spine, tail, arms, and the spikes on its back. By creating slight delays between these elements, the movement appeared more natural and organic. This helped make the character feel more vivid and realistic. Another useful technique I learned was the use of Animation Layers in Maya. The tutor explained that it can be helpful to create the breathing motion on one animation layer and then add other actions, such as body movement or acting, on separate layers. This makes the animation process more flexible and easier to manage. I would like to use this workflow in future projects.

Overall, I really enjoyed this workshop. It gave me new technical knowledge, practical skills, and a fresh perspective on character animation. Looking back, I can see my progress, and I feel motivated to continue improving my animation skills in the future.

Dialogue Shot Blocking

This week, I also polished my audio animation shot. Although it is still in the blocking stage, I added camera angles to improve the storytelling and visual clarity of the scene. When deciding on the camera angles, I considered how to guide the viewer’s attention toward the character’s movement, rather than distracting them with unnecessary complexity. I used two simple camera setups, from a side view and a front view. This allowed the audience to clearly focus on the character’s performance.

The animation shows one character expressing a message similar to “go live your life” to another character. Because of this, I initially included both characters in the same shot. However, after that moment, I shifted the focus more toward the main character in order to emphasise facial expressions, different angles, and emotional changes. To be honest, I feel that camera work and composition are still my weak points. Because of this, I plan to study camera angles and layout more deeply. I have found that library resources are especially helpful for this, so I would like to use them more actively for self-study in the future.

Overlap

This week, I created an animation shot during a workshop class. We worked on animating a sea monster character, focusing on overlapping action, particularly in the tail movement.

The main goal was to understand how to animate the tail using overlapping techniques, where different parts of the tail move with a slight delay from one another. Before taking this workshop, I struggled to understand how overlapping action worked, especially for tails and chains of bones in character rigs. However, through this exercise, I gained a much clearer understanding of both the technique and the workflow required to create convincing overlapping motion.

One challenge was that the sea monster rig was much more complex than the character rigs I had used before. As a result, I found it difficult to control some parts of the character. Although I did my best to apply the overlapping technique, there were moments when the tail movement felt unnatural. For example, when the character moved from side to side, parts of the tail sometimes moved in the opposite direction, making the motion look slightly strange. Despite these difficulties, I was able to understand the fundamentals of overlapping action much better than before. I would like to continue practising this technique so that I can create smoother and more natural tail movements in future projects.

After submitting the exercise, we watched everyone’s animations in class. I was very impressed by the quality of my classmates’ work. Many students had strong ideas for camera angles, composition, and staging, which made their shots engaging and visually appealing. What I found most interesting was that, even though we all used the same rig and character, every animation felt different. Each student brought their own personality, emotions, and creative ideas into their work. This reminded me how important it is to develop a unique style and approach when creating animation for a portfolio or showreel. It is definitely something I would like to think about more in my future projects.