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.