OUAN603 - Extended Practice: Material Play & Rough Tests

OUAN603 - Extended Practice:

Material Play & Rough Tests

https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/how-to/adobe-character-animator.html (An interesting tutorial regarding the use of Adobe Character Animator)

http://blogs.adobe.com/aftereffects/2015/04/adobe-character-animator-revealed.html

https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/character-animator.html#Install%20Adobe%20Character%20Animator

The above links are some great sites I found on the Adobe Character Animator extension of Creative Cloud 2015. I was incredibly keen to try this out and have a play with the features and weigh up the pros and cons, comparing with frame by frame animation. However, after the meeting with the principal and her team, it was made apparant that due to Apple's operating system issues, CC2015 cannot run on the current system and thus will not be available anytime this academic year for me to or any others to use. So, in order to find a way around this, I ventured around looking for new methods of animating my puppets.

Feedback regarding the length and flow of my animation was questioned, and it was later suggested that three individual one-minute animations would be more appropriate for both me and the audience as (not to be patronising) it would hold their attention and they would "feel okay giving up a minute of their time". I feel that this would make the scripting easier as it will mean I do not have to have the characters interacting with one another and I focus wholly on their individual movements without having to create some kind of flow and connection between them all having one movement lead onto another. 

After having a short play with Character Animator in the mezzanine, it was decided that actually, it wasn't that suitable as the movement was very jerky and not in way that would be easy to pass off as the jerkiness of regular puppets. The program itself ran quite slowly and had a myriad of errors and problems. I also wondered about how my voice actors would possibly be able to act in front of a webcam in their home studios with their own copy of character animator using my own pre-made puppets on one collective file sent out to them so that they could record their facial expressions and movement. It all seemed to complex and a bit silly and unreasonable. I abandoned the idea of Character Animator and instead moved onto the idea of either using the regular built-in puppet tool in After Effects or a free extension called DUIK that allowed you to create more realistic movements that take into account the natural restrictions that our bodies have, such as the way our bones can't bend past a certain degree. I plan to play with these a bit more and decide on the most appropriate.