Laura MacMahon, is a Senior animator who has worked with Axis for 6 years, within layout and animation. and worked on a vast array of amazing projects. for; Magic of the gathering, League of Legends, and various others.
Worked on Layout and animation for the first feature film at Axis Studios - Scrooge: a Christmas carol.
When animating the characters faces, mainly sticking to on face controls to quickly pose the characters, and use a library of poses to speed up the process.
For this production it was important to be as efficient as possible.
with a "Finished not perfect" attitude.
The shots are also scheduled To ensure they have continuity.
Slotted times to shoot reference and a final reference is approved and used for the shot.
but didn't focus on the micromovements from video reference. Spending a period of time with the audio on a loop and acting to it, helped to become the character, with the last reference Laura took ended up being the best.
Then go onto plot the main acting beats, hitting the audio cues and simplifying the actions between. The style of the animation used the reference as base, then to find and push the appropriate 12 principles of animation. E.g. Squash and stretch, timing, secondary action. with a goal to clarify the emotion of the character.
"Facial animation sells everything" let the body do its own thing.
Marley- the ghost in chains, Had many challenges.
-one being that the chains were animated and not simulated.
-You cant see the characters eyes, so needed to compensate by over animating
the body and used the flames on the eyes to convey the emotion / personality of the character.
Emoting- characters thoughts + feelings. what are they doing/ saying and how does that make the character feel?
Animation layers are really useful- Helps organise animation with a non-destructive workflow. you can also copy and paste into other shots. layers allow to add a texture. E.g. the shaking of the jaw when singing - vibrato. but Animation layers can be used in a variety of ways.
Laura also worked with crowd and clean-up, even working on a scene with 20 characters, to compensate for this, though still being difficult. an efficient technique is to put more attention to detail to the characters in the main focal point and gradually reduce the complexity outside the focal point, making sure not to have any characters completely still, can focus on micro-moments and weight shifts.
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