Final Animation Project

For the final animation project, I decided to follow the reference video of Rowan Atkinson’s ‘Mr Bean’ character practising different handshakes and preparing himself to meet the Queen. I chose this because I thought it was a simple, yet challenging animation with some snappy movements. So, I thought I would use this reference video to further aid my animation skills and to gain a better understanding of how to make fast motions in animation.

At first, I started key-framing the main poses of the character, using the reference video, and then I changed from step tangents to spline to see what it looked like as it follows through to the main key-frames. After that, I just added more keys where he would pause, step around with his feet, or quickly move his hands and head movements. This allowed me to make the animation more accurate to the reference video and as I went through the different control curves, I found that there were quite a few errors with them. I used the graph editor to change the different tangents that I had placed on the key-frames, which helped me to get the snappy movements of the character and to get it to a good state for the rest of the animation.

Therefore, my overall animation included the correct poses I needed from the reference video and some snappy movements of the character, but it did not have all of the right movements that Rowan Atkinson did in his skit. If I were to do this again, I would improve by going through the different tangents to fix them and adding in some additional frames for the pauses/ quick movements.

Link to animation video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwApOYubPZ5QVWFNSWowV2JoUFE/view?usp=sharing

reference video: