Animation 1 Study Task - Strike a Pose

Relaying emotion is one of the most important techniques that an animator can have in order to drive the diegesis of the narrative. After all, animation is a method of storytelling just like film with all the same parameters only manifested through different techniques. I believe that with this study task I got to revise Maya since there was a possibility of forgetting everything I had learned about it last year, considering I do plan on doing at least one full animation in Maya in the future just so I can see the experience. Nevertheless, I consulted last year's notes on Maya and some of my peers into reminding me about Maya's tools, shortcuts, and workspace so that I could have full control of Moom and all of his controllers. Quite a structured task, I chose the emotions surprise, happiness, bravado, confusion, and envy since I thought that these 5 are the ones that can be most effectively portrayed by a character in a still image. For example, I find that anxiety and timidity can be thoroughly connoted only by an animated character, whereas it would be easy for those emotions to be misinterpreted in a still image. Anxiety manifests differently from person to person, whereas timidity is based on body language plus vocalization - based on what a man says, timidity can be inferred. Nevertheless, choosing these five emotions was not absolute, since I initially tried doing tiredness and exhaustion, but could not get them right in photographic reference, so I scrapped them. As I started posing Moom, it took me less and less time for every consequential pose while I got the hang of Maya yet again. I did not find the facial controllers difficult at all, and also realized that the position of one's eyelids do play a big role in emotion in relation to the position of the pupils. In 2D animation that is manifested through the shape of the drawn eyes, where with Moom it was about the eyelids. For example, for envy, it was extremely necessary to shape Moom's eyelids a bit closed, otherwise the emotion seemed dry and stiff. I followed every reference image to the bone except for surprise, where I thought that a sense of awe in the surprise gave off a more natural appeal to emotion. Nevertheless, I learned a lot from this study task although I was really tediously purging myself into doing it (which is why I did it now instead of the moment it was assigned to me just like the rest of the tasks).