reference footage

I knew very well that I was going to have to get some form of reference footage for my animation in the form of acting out the performance that I want my characters to give. with this in mind I employed the help of one of my friends to act out the most important pieces of movement in the animation to gather reference from.

After this was filmed I had to collate the footage, arrange it in chronological order and edit the animation in. here is the finished reference timeline:

There were various difficulties with this process such as the lack of space in the room I chose and the lack of preparation in terms of props.

After a motion capture induction I thought that if I were to re-visit this section of pre-production I would properly organise a larger space with more actors and capture the whole script instead of chunks, and maybe also do some motion capture along side it as that is what many companies do in their pre-production work such as The Last of Us that had a crazy set up to capture every detail of the performance and then that performance was used by the animators as reference including facial cameras for facial animation.

But none the less this was a crucial and beneficial process to my module as it very much solidifies the actions that my characters needed to take, no matter how small, which couldn't be brought visualised in the storyboard or animation.