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 pretty satisfied with how it turned out.  There is likely some areas of improvement, but as a first time animating something from scratch, I would say it's not a bad start.  I learned so much about the animation process through this, along with finding good angles.  The experience from this project helped the final result of my later creative blitz, "Ancient Search."