Learning about Glen Keane and watching some of his animations was one of my favourite parts as it helped me to understand and better my animation thought process as he uses the principles in his work all the time. Learning about Keane made me think of one of my favourite artists Aaron Blaise who also worked at Disney. He too uses the 12 principles in his work and trained under some of the greatest animators of that period. He has directed Brother Bear and also worked on many different films. I love his use of squash and stretch and I even did one of his courses on bear anatomy where he taught how to squash and stretch faces without changing the shape of the skull and making it look natural, Keeping the mass the same.

I really remembered mass for this brief and tried to keep that in my head to make my characters look more natural in shape.

Jess gave us a very cool idea generating task which was to think of an emotion and then think of shapes that come to mind when imagining that feeling and how they would move:

My first idea above was to make an animation of the shape dancing and showing change in emotion from scared to confident and he would become a star at the end to show use of emotion through different shapes. A couple other shapes would be watching him, stacked shapes that moved in a very structured way contrasting the emotion, natural movement and vibrancy that the main rectangle character would be using to make the audience know that he is the focal point.

Here are some character designs I created for the animation:

When I started to do the animation I was feeling a sense of boredom and that my idea wasn’t as creative as I wanted it to be. I was finding it hard to work on the project because it lacked basic depth of story and a reason as to why I was creating this piece with the emotions that I was. It lacked my creative flare so I decided to start again and transform my piece into an original idea.

I stripped it back to the dance floor brief that made me interested in doing dancing shapes to show emotion and I started breaking down what dance was and how I could show change of shape and emotion through characters. Instantly I thought of those nature documentaries that fascinated me as a child and how the bird mating dances on those programmes were so powerful at showing change in shape to show emotion. That’s when I wanted to try and show that idea through my shapes and try to capture the feeling of showing off and rejection in my main character while also showing lack of interest from my female character. The female character will be a more feminine shape made up of triangular shapes to show her sharp nature, the bottom of the shape implies the curves of the female form and of a dress like shape without changing the emotion of the triangles. The male one a more boxy nature for the male form.

The female shape is meant to look more sharp to show how she can represent rejection and sharpness so triangular forms.

The rectangle is a very strong bold shape to show that he is showing off.

Once he is rejected he will transform into a soft form to show vulnerability and sadness.

These were the new designs:

I thought it would be so interesting to show him growing another shape out of his head to represent change of shape in birds when they plume their feathers of puff out their chest but also to show follow through as I can use the extra part to move around as an object that is attached to him but it doesn’t follow his structure.

my piece will demonstrate the principles of animation through this idea but my main interest is showing one of my favourite ones squash and stretch like Aaron Blaise in my research.