Module2- Character Preformance and Believibility- Group work

so for the group project we looked at MJ's thriller  dance it has iconic steps which are easy to recognise, even with stiff stickfas men preforming them. everyone animated thier own character and mine is the tone on the far right. to get the moves right we simply looked at some thriller instructional  dance videos and copied the movments. we also looked at the origional Michael Jackson music video for inspiration and to sync it with the music. i have linked the dance video that we found most helpful below. over all we found our piece to be good but it could have been better so we decided to make a few other videos later.

At this point i felt i wanted to do another video, as did Jacky and so we decided to experiment with lighting and concentrate on the characters movment. so we created a scene using spot lights to make a clear difference between light and dark. jackys character jumps down in the shaddows which took a long time to get right but looked amazing. we animated our own characters and tried to build tension  just before jackys character  kicks mine. i felt that something as simple as having my character scratch his head sould communicate a confused look because of the Stickfas characters have no faces.

We were supposed to  make more on this video the next day and Andys character was supposed to come in but Jacky couldnt make it so Andy and I created another animtion. this time our characters were balanced on the edge of an 'Animation light box' which made it harder for them to balance. we experimented with panning the camera from one character to another. making the movment look real. so you can identify the karate master from the lazy bum in the beginning. also some movments were slower than others and we made an effort to show that. the only down side was that a few shots were blured and we didnt notice untill the end.  we used wire to make a paper ball fly through the air and  typical comic book anotations were appropriate and they worked well.

we were largly influenced by the video below.