For week 4 we were tasked with creating an animation featuring a secondary action. Secondary actions are actions which happen as a result of another action and are used to add interest and complexity to animations. effective secondary actions could include hair bobbing in the wind, tears on a persons face as they are sad, anything which adds to the animation and a greater sense of emotion or improves your storytelling.
I started off exploring secondary actions by watching this YouTube video by Alan Becker. He has compiled some very useful tutorials based around the 12 principals of animation and I have watched a good few of his videos to date and have found them very helpful. In the video he shows a lot of different examples for what a secondary action could consist of. At one stage he shows a man eating a burger and what actions could be used to convey how much he is enjoying his burger. I thought this was a really interesting concept and decided that I wanted to give this a go. However after spending a while sketching and failing to draw a person and burger I was happy with I decided that I would instead try to follow one of his other example. This was the knocking on a door animation.
Attempt 1
As mentioned I began attempting to animate my character knocking a door. I started off simple like in Alans video and made the secondary action a clenching of the non-knocking fist to try and convey intent and serious emotion. I feel that this slight changed worked pretty well. However I wanted to take it a step further and add a new body part which would move as he was knocking. I decided that this would be a tail.
The tail start off pretty well and in theory would have probably worked overall, however I decided that would be enough for this attempt and didn't finish it off, as we can see I never even gave my character a head. I think I tried to go to complex too quick and therefore that's why I began to struggle and move on.
Final Attempt
After feeling that I bit off more than I could chew with my first attempt I decided to go back to basics and use my already animated walk cycle.. I had seen a few animations where people had added hair to there walk cycles and used this as there secondary action.
I decided that I would add a helmet with a big piece of material on top of it which moves pretty much like hair. My inspiration being a roman soldier helmet or something along those lines.
Overall I think my secondary action turned out quite well. I feel that the "hair" moves in a way which follows the up and downs of the body during the walk. I think the biggest problem with it is the size. I was finding it a bit difficult to keep the same scale throughout but also convey the movement, I think it works okay but this is definitely an area I would need to improve upon in the future. I also tried to convey a sense of gravity and weight in the hair and make it feel like it had its own separate weight to the character, however I don't think I've done this particularly well and it is probably something I need to look at again. I feel that while the "hair" does move with the character in a secondary motion it kind of just follows the same movements as the character rather than what its own weight would really allow. I would need to revise this and try to make it more exaggerated or realistic depending on what feel I am going for.
For my future animations I have definitely learned to do the simple and main movements first and then go back and add in the more complex parts later if this is possible, also do as much sketching before trying to do any clean animation. I have far to big a habit of just wanting to jump straight in without doing the proper preparation beforehand. Also watching animation videos on YouTube is a great place to learn and gain inspiration from and something which I plan to watch a lot more of in the future.