When creating, I keep in mind fluidity, attention to detail, and expressive movement. My art is in the form of 3D animation with the goal of communicating strong emotions with context and intensity while achieving feelings of joy, surprise, disgust, and fear. With an admiration of 3D animation as the intersection of art and technology, I am inspired by animations that show originality and make me laugh and cry through body and facial expressions.

My work expresses these strong emotions by adding details to my animation that help convey such distinct feelings. I have chosen 3D animation as my medium because it is what I was first introduced to in my high school animation class where I learned of the hard work that goes into 3D animation and gained a deep appreciation for animated movies, TV shows, and short films. Also, I prefer 3D space because of the complexity and depth of working in multiple dimensions and axes. Because of the depth that 3D space provides, I can exaggerate the movements to help amplify the emotions of the animation often in a short period of time. Often in animation, you need to literally and figuratively “sell” your work, which is why it is important to amplify the emotions and movements of an animation to captivate your audience. To help me amplify my animation, I shoot abundant amounts of video reference so that I can capture the appropriate timing and find areas or movements that allow for exaggeration.

My previous experience as a dancer and dance teacher allows me to incorporate my knowledge about dance into my animation work. With my dance training, I have a better understanding of how the body executes movement, which helps me make decisions on how to animate and show fluid movement. With that knowledge, I am challenging myself to add small adjustments and movements to help me achieve the strong emotions I want to invoke. In exploring animation, I hope to find new ways to make viewers feel strong emotions through my work and successfully convey my ideas with fluid and expressive movement.

The first step in creating my Capstone was to find a suitable rigged character model, then create the character's personality. My main inspiration for the character's poses comes from Joel Dos Reis Viegas's "THEIF Sketches" from ArtStation, where they show dynamic and dramatic poses. Once I had a general idea for my character's personality, I focused on posing the character when in idle mode. The idle pose is crucial because it ties together the beginning and end of each animation, allowing the movement to loop when continuously played.

Once I solidified the idle pose, I started adding more personality to the character by creating the second idle animation where the character does an action after being idle for an extended amount of time. This seond idle animation is inspired by an iconic pose in the anime "Death Note" in which a character named "L" sits in a squatting position. I made the decision to reference anime in my project because it is something I enjoy watching and often get inspiration for my own animation. The taunt animation is also inspired by a popular scene from the anime "Dragon Ball" in which the character Krillin makes fun of his opponent during a fight.

For each animation, I created a blocking and spline pass before polishing each animation. Separating the animation into each pass allowed me to be more precise in my movements and improve upon each pass.