Character Head Turn Tests

To get a sense of 3D space in my film, not only am I setting up the layouts in 3D space with cameras, I am also making the characters appear 3D so they won't look stuck on top of the 3D scenes. The most important aspect of the characters to get right and create the illusion of them being in 3D space is the head turns.

I started with William because his head shape is difficult to get right in 3/4 view due to his nose being a right angled triangle. Betty is much easier because she has a circle for a head. 

William

William is the antagonist so the animation has to show he is the 'one to look out for' in the sense of what he is planning. I want the audience to get the idea that this character is Betty's match or opposite so I have decided to make his movements more quirky and stylised than Betty's. I think the animation style I am going for reflects the design, both in aesthetic and personality, of the characters equally.

First attempt at the head turn for William. His 3/4 head blend shapes (Head3/4Left, HeadLeftHOLD, HeadRightHOLD and Head3/4Right) also have both his eye pre-comps visible and animated between each other through the opacity property of both LeftEYE and RightEYE pre-comps. The animation is so quick and snappy that the audience doesn't get time to read the fact that both eyes are visible.

Fig. 1. Quicktime rendered from After Effects - WilliamHeadTurnTest1

Second attempt at the head turn for William. I hid the LeftEYE prec-omp from the timeline to see how he looks with just one eye shared between the two faces. I animated the RightEYE pre-comp through the position property and snapped between positions on 1's.

Fig. 2. Quicktime rendered from After Effects - WilliamHeadTurnTest2

Now that I have nailed the head turn, I can add mouth shapes. To get the idea, I just gave him a smile.

Fig. 3. Quicktime rendered from After Effects - WilliamHeadTurnTest3

Now that he has a smile, he needs some eye blinks ...

Fig. 4. Quicktime rendered from After Effects - WilliamHeadTurnTest4

Betty

Betty was much easier to work with because I knew how to get a head turn just right with William. Here I've given her smoother and gentler movements which reflects her personality of a caring young woman. For the montage sequence, I will animate her moving much quicker which will emphasise the severity of her situation as the audience will have gotten used to her soft gentle movements in the first two thirds of the film so when they see her hectic and rushing round stressing, we will sympathise with her and we feel she is out of her comfort zone. This will also be reflected in how she appears during and after the montage sequence through her messy uniforms and roughed up hair. 

When I showed Hilary the animation below yesterday afternoon, she quickly commented on how the ears appear and disappear too quickly and gives it a snappy appearance which isn't what I am going for with this character. To fix this, I will illustrate two in-betweens for her head shapes with the ears attached.

Fig. 5. Quicktime rendered from After Effects - BettyHeadTurnTest1

For the head turn blend shapes to work without having to redraw each hair blend shape and just animate the hair by key framing the scale property of the hair layer, I had to go back to the layers of the file and edit the sublayers a little so the head asset (the head itself and the hair) wasn't made up of three separate layers in After Effects but rather just the two - one for the head and one for the hair. I used the Minus Front tool so the 'HairFront' layer (pictured below) took away the top of Betty's head layer and made two separate layers out of the two shapes remaining. I then copied the new 'Head' layer twice and deleted the outlines for the ears - calling one HeadLEFT and HeadRIGHT.

Before

Fig. 6. Illustrator Screenshot of BettyMaster ai. file

After

Fig. 7. Illustrator Screenshot of BettyMaster ai. file