Firsts! - Faux Cap

Firsts! - Faux Cap and Introduction to Experimental Animation

The best thing about your uni telling you 'your next project is all based around experimental animation', is that I have a green light to just go mad and try and create as many tests and animations as possible, while using as many new methods as possible.

Sure there's a few I have to look at, but for me, I wanted to use this opportunity to really set myself a challenge, and use the next month and a half to create as many truly unique animations as possible, with each one being totally different in style, and in technique from the last.

The first thing I wanted to look at was something I've always wanted to try, using a real life actor (myself) as reference footage for an animation I would create later. This is very commonly done in the animation industry, but what I wanted to do was work in an element of mocap as well (though a bit different) so that I could understand gesture and anatomy in my drawings better.

To do this I used a method that I've dubbed 'faux cap', which involved me acting out a series of actions, (a punch, a throw, and a slouch), and then breaking these actions down into frames and drawing a rig over my body at key anatomical points.

I could then use this reference imagery of the skeleton to inform my drawn animation, which was better than just using my body since I could use it for any humanoid character, instead of having to use the restrictions of my own body shape.

When played back, I get a clear skeleton that I can use as a guideline in different software that serves as the rough shape of my character, to ensure my overall shapes are correct.

Obviously I still need to tweak these to better include the 12 principles of animation (as well as several other illustration principles), but being able to use myself as a reliable guide for basically any animation I can think of is extremely useful, as any artist who's trawled through image and reference sites for that one image will know!