Consistency

Consistency is a very important aspect of animation, I find. There's character consistency of course, and that's what a character reference sheet is for. Otherwise, they'll probably start evolving. My reference is a little dodgy, like everything else I do, and I draw basically a morph of the dude on the sheet and my maquette, which was based off an earlier model, smart kid I am. Not ideal, but it's alright.

Then there's the animation itself. I think that's an area I am being too lax in. There's many different styles of animating: fast, sharp, light and bouncy, slow and smooth etc. Being a virtual beginner in this area, I am not too aware of the differences, and how to employ them; my main concern is believability, at my level. And I would assume that being a team of one would make that less cause for concern. But style clash, if it happened, would not be pretty, for next to how they look, a great defining characteristic of a character is how they move.

Which brings me to my third point. For our film and animation projects we are taught to create character bibles which define a character's world, their needs, desires, motivations. And in pre-production mode, I thought all of it was obvious, right there at the back of my head when I needed it. But in pre-production mode, that's all you think about, right, you're developing the story, so you basically are living in the character's minds. In production mode, your mind is on other things:

• timing
• gesture
• anatomy
• drawing to model
• anticipation
• follow-through
• overlap
• squash and stretch
• catching up to where you're meant to be on your schedule

So on and so forth. What is easy to forget, however, is that all that is informed by the character as an entity in a story, or as an individual who is alive. Everything is for a reason. There must be thought behind the action, as we were told in my 3D character animation class. And, excellent student I am, I have not looked at my bibles since I handed them in for marking.

Thoughts of a hypocritical amateur.