Comically Long Spoon 

The Story

While I was at school,  my instructor would have something called a "Creative Blitz" roughly at the end of each semester where we had to work on a project using the new skills we had learned during that semester.  Typically there was no specific direction for these projects except for suggestions of themes tailored to what we had learned.

For this particular blitz, I was prompted to make a character animation based on a clip of audio.  This was the first semester of my third year, and previous to this blitz, I had been taking my first real deep-dive into character animation.

For this project, I used the audio from a video called "Comically Long Spoon" by raxdflipnote:

The Process

Creating the Scene

Since the concept was pretty straighforward and I already had an idea for what shots I wanted, I immediately started working on the scene.  I built the scene using free assets and a character rig, and set up the camera angles, moving the rigs where needed in order to find the best angle.  I then began work on the animation.

Blocking

I started blocking out the main movements for the characters, focusing on primary movement and the most noticeable secondary movement.

Refining Animation

I then made the animation look a little more natural by smoothing parts of the animation.  I did not end up moving the mouth of the character to the words that were being said, as that was not the goal for this creative blitz

The Result

In the end, I'm satisfied with how it turned out.  There is definitely some areas of improvement, but as a first time to animate something from scratch, I would say it's not a bad start.  Had I had more time, I would have loved to expand the scope of this project by adding more details to the scenery and characters.   Through this project, I learned so much about the animation process along with finding good camera angles to tell an effective story, as it was satisfying to see results of a thought come to life.   

I would later use the experience from this project to help me work on my next Creative Blitz, "Ancient Search."