This week focused on creature animation and continuing the Dialogue Shot assignment. On Thursday, we started the Group Assignment: Creature Study, where we had to choose an animal topic and research it from an animation point of view. The aim was not just to collect random facts, but to study details that would actually help with animation, such as how the creature moves, behaves, turns, speeds up, slows down, and how its anatomy affects the movement.
For my creature study, I chose fish. We focused mainly on locomotion, especially fins and gills movement, and how fish speed up, slow down and turn in water. We also looked at how timing can change depending on the species. This was useful because fish movement is not only about the tail moving side to side. The fins, body, gills and direction changes all work together to make the motion feel natural.
The creature animation lecture helped explain the process of studying animals before animating them. We were encouraged to collect a lot of video reference, build a reference library from different angles, and study the creature before trying to animate it. The lecture also explained that creature locomotion depends on understanding anatomy and movement patterns, even if we do not need to become anatomy experts.
Even though many examples in the lecture focused on quadrupeds, the same idea still applies to fish. Instead of studying legs and gaits, I had to think about the body curve, rhythm, fins, tail and how the motion travels through the body. For fish, the spine/body curve is especially important because the movement often flows from the front of the body towards the tail, with the fins helping with balance, steering and subtle adjustments.
On Friday, we continued with the Dialogue Shot – Blocking Plus assignment. At this stage, the shot had to move beyond rough blocking and become clearer in terms of timing, acting and facial performance. Since this is a dialogue shot, the main focus is not just body movement, but how the body, face and mouth shapes support the character’s intention.
We also had Lip Sync Demo & Tutorials available as support. These tutorials were useful because they reminded us to use reference, even if it is just a mirror, to check mouth shapes. This connected back to the lip sync lesson from the previous week, where we learned to animate the sounds rather than the written words.