Reactions & Emotions - Anger to Fear

After taking part in a Performance class in an attempt to understand motion & posing more effectively, the concept for our motion studies project is to illustrate a change of emotion using a simplistic character. It is supposed to appear as though the character is reacting to something out of frame & is to be shown in the character's body language & the way he moves.



The sketched thumbnails to the left are to understand the main movements & keyframes in the animation before I begin to experiment with animating the main frames.

Firstly I videoed myself attempting to capture such a reaction in my body language & movement (below) to attempt to get an idea of what sort of

movements & body shapes would be required. When mimicking becoming angry I noticed I had the tendency to curve my spin creating a more convex shape, which I could translate into my animation.

I then thumb nailed the basic shapes & movements I thought would be necessary to create the change of emotion, testing the animation with a basic stick man character before developing it slightly further later on (left).

Above is the more detailed 2D animation, created with animation paper & the use of a line tester, I also added in simplistic facial features to add the detail of expression to enhance the idea of the emotion I was attempting to portray along with the use body language.

The weakest part, in my opinion, is the last part of the movement into the 'fear' pose. I think that the idea of covering the face & bringing the arms up is possibly slightly cliched & I also struggled to show the movement of the arms effectively. The increasing feeling of anger is the part I believe to be the most effective as there is a sense of self assured-ness when the character pushes his chest out at first, then bringing his shoulders forward as his back - similarly to a hissing, angry cat - & his arms raise making himself larger asserting dominance as well as anger.