Self Evaluation: Animation Power Centres

By December 3, 2014 May 11th, 2016 Computer Arts Practice

Note: The animation work done in this post was done for Creative Research. However the evaluation has been solely written for this blog.

In Creative Research I have been exploring power centres and how they are used in animation to help convey a mood or sense of personality or emotion in a character.

I decided to evaluate this task on these aims:

  • Timing
  • Posture
  • Personality/Character

Timing

Power centres dictate where a character’s energy comes from. A more characterised person will be more influenced by their power centre. Power centres also affect the rhythm of the character. A character with a low power centre will naturally have a slower tempo.

In each of the three animations I made sure to aim to capture the right rhythm for each power centre. I think this was done well, however in the second video (power centre in the waist) I think the timing was off and could have been better worked in with the movements of the waist and hips.

Posture

The aim was to have the power centre of each character affect their posture as well as the way their posture moves as they walk. I think this was done most effectively in the low power centre animation as the character’s back seems to bend around the point. As he walks he also bounces around the power centre. This animation I think was most effective in conveying a sense of mood.

With the middle power centre there was not enough rotation in the waist and this would’ve better helped give him a posture more fitting to his character. In the high power centre animation I think I got the posture correct although I’d have liked to have tried more iterations to try out different ideas.

Personality/Character

My aim of the task was to see how power centres affect a character’s personality. I think it was most effective where I let the power centre characterise the character more such as in the low power centre animation (first video) and was least effective where I didn’t allow the character to be as influenced as much by it such as in the middle power centre (second video). I think the high power centre (third video) was a happy medium and was satisfactory for the aims but more iterations of that one power centre could have yield different personalities.

Overall I think this task was attempted well but I could have gone further with a lot of things. More iterations would be the best idea moving on and there’s nothing stopping me from coming back to this task. I think it will help my animations this semester, particularly with the desk flip animation where the character is very tense where he types.

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