COP 3: Animating Robin Williams

With animating Robin Williams, I was conscious of how much time I'd already spent on the previous two failed projects so new I needed to begin the production process as soon as possible so the less pre-production work the better. Creating cartoonised versions of Marc Maron and Robin Williams was fairly easy as I drew them in a way that they could be animated fairly quickly, yet also be pretty recognisable.

I then set about developing keyframes for the animation. Constantly refering back to my question of focus; How Does Animation Evoke Emotion?, I made sure to keep in mind that in this twenty second clip, a clip of which Williams expresses a large variety of emotions, I needed to make sure my animation evoked all these emotions. If he sounded angry in a clip, I needed to express this in my animation. But not just express what is there, at this point my intentions were very clear, I needed to exaggerate on what was already there.

As you can see, when creating these keyframes, I felt it was important to keep the essence of Williams throughout. That is why I made sure when creating a facial expression to try to use him as reference first. This is different to the technique I was attempting before when I was trying to animate a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I was using reference then but there I was essentially copying so I wasn't really making anything my own. Here, all his actions I've completely made up, it is literally just my interpretation of his dialogue.