CHARACTERS
The concept i used as the reasoning behind my technique for this animation was the theatre. i my idea was to set up my own stage and have the actors walking arounds the set.but also like in a play the actors always moving even if they are not speaking, they dont just freeze so i didnt want my animation to either. i wanted the charecters to reacter to each other and the enviroment. so i created full puppets with lots of moving parts; each body part are seperate layers that are joind together by and after effects rig which helps with the realistic illusion.
PROFILES
FACE RIG
As I was using after effects to do my animation, i thought the best way to control the face is to treat it much like the body; by creating a rig. When I built this rig, the intentions was to make a simple was to control the facial features without many moving parts. So i drew my elements on different layers, there are about 10-15 different mouth shapes for each charecter, this helped when trying to avoid unnecessary mouth movements i tried the aim for just the extreme and most common possitions. the eyes and nose are set up in the same way but with less shapes. finally in after effects i was able to use an expression which links the shapes to the blocks and the top. wich gave me an end result like this.
EARLY SKETCHCES
