Applied Animation 8: Reference Filming

Because its such a heavy character based animation we decided it would be best to film ourselves as reference to animate from. Because Aardman films a lot of reference footage we also felt it would be helpful to do so. We also made sure to place ourselves in frame to get an accurate idea of the movement and what would be seen.

Acting out exactly what we wanted the characters to be doing and the mannerisms we wanted them to have was a lot harder than i was first expecting, we had to re shoot so many times because we either forgot the words, didn't act out the actions we wanted to, or generally just felt a touch uncomfortable doing it. I heard that the last years second years had an acting workshop, though it would be daunting to have had to "act" in front of people i feel like it would have been helpful for this exersize.

We ended up with a lot of reference footage, and after we compiled the best elements of all of them we have an accurate idea of how we want out characters to move.