Author: Charlotte Juliens

This week’s assignment focused on creating expressive hand poses in 3D, using the same rig as the previous week. The aim was to make the emotion and action readable using only the hands, without relying on the character’s face or body.

I studied hand gestures in animation and real-life reference to understand how finger spacing, tension, and angles affect clarity. Small changes in finger curl and wrist rotation made a big difference in how expressive each pose felt. I also focused on keeping the poses clean and easy to read from the chosen camera angle.

This exercise helped me better understand how hands alone can communicate emotion and intention, and how important they are in selling acting and performance in animation.

This week focused on improving pose clarity and anatomy, starting with a hand pose assignment. I created 1–3 hand poses using real-life reference from my own hands, studying how fingers naturally curve and how gestures communicate intention. Looking at animated hand work by artists like Milt Kahl and Glen Keane helped me understand how simple shapes and clear angles make hand poses feel expressive and readable.

Alongside this, I continued developing my Franky pose-to-pose animation, pushing the quality as far as possible while keeping to a single camera angle. I focused on strengthening the key poses and improving the flow between them before moving fully into polish.

This week reinforced how important strong fundamentals are, especially hands and poses, as they play a big role in selling emotion and clarity in animation.

This week’s focus was on finishing the Franky pose-to-pose animation up to the blocking stage. The aim was to establish clear key poses and strong storytelling before moving on to refinement or polish.

I worked from reference to improve the clarity of each pose and made sure the transitions between poses felt readable and intentional. Keeping the animation in blocking allowed me to concentrate on timing, spacing, and pose clarity without getting distracted by smaller details.

This week reinforced the importance of building animation in clear stages. Spending time strengthening the blocking gives the shot a much stronger foundation before moving forward.

This week focused on pushing acting and emotion through pose clarity. We were asked to create three distinct poses showing different emotions, using real-life reference and focusing on strong silhouettes and clear body language rather than facial detail.

Alongside this, I continued working on the juice box acting shot, refining the blocking and bringing the animation to a polish level in spline. The final shot combined the falling motion with the acting beat, focusing on believable weight, clean timing, and smoother transitions between poses.

This week reinforced how important strong poses are at every stage of animation. Clear emotional poses made the acting more readable, while polishing the juice box shot helped me better understand how timing, spacing, and weight work together in a finished animation.

This week in Ting’s class we focused on creating a single golden pose in 3D, without relying on animation reference. The aim was to communicate emotion clearly through body language alone. I explored poses that suggest sadness or regret, paying close attention to weight distribution, line of action, and silhouette, while checking the pose from multiple angles to make sure it worked in 3D space.

Alongside this, we were introduced to a simple acting brief using the juice box rig. After fixing the falling animation, one juice box “comes to life” and reacts using pantomime only, with no audio. The focus was on blocking, strong poses, timing, and believable weight rather than polished animation.

This week reinforced how much emotion and storytelling can be communicated through clear poses and body mechanics, even with very simple characters and setups.

This week in Ting’s class, the focus was on showing weight through animation. The assignment was to animate two juice cartons falling, one empty and one full, to clearly communicate the difference in mass and weight. The animation was kept short (24–72 frames) and shown from side views and a 45-degree angle.

When planning this, I focused on how timing, acceleration, and impact change depending on weight. The full carton falls with more force and settles more heavily, while the empty carton feels lighter and less grounded. Small differences in spacing and follow-through helped sell this contrast.

Alongside this, I continued analysing golden poses, studying strong body poses in animation and breaking them down by focusing on clear silhouettes and weight distribution. This reinforced how even simple poses can clearly communicate physical properties like balance and mass.

This week helped me better understand how weight, timing, and pose clarity work together to make animation feel believable.

This week in Ting’s class we focused on animation analysis, specifically identifying strong golden poses in existing animated shots. The aim was to observe good animation and break it down by focusing on clear body key poses, ignoring facial animation to better understand posture, balance, and line of action.

By analysing frames from animated scenes, I looked at how the body is arranged to communicate intent and movement clearly. Drawing over the poses helped highlight strong silhouettes, weight distribution, and how the arms, torso, and legs work together to guide the viewer’s eye.

This exercise showed how much information can be communicated through a single strong pose. Studying animation frame by frame helped me better understand how professional animators use clear body poses to sell motion and character, which I can now apply to my own animation work.