Rendered Final Animation

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP40w9shws4

                Here is my finished animation for this semester. I have some reasons for why I consider it effective and where it could have been improved. First of all, the facial animation itself is quite strong. I think the lip syncing is almost spot on with the various blendshapes working nicely to form the letters to a pretty nice degree. The arcs on the arms work quite well due to my manipulation of the graph editor, but a negative is that there are still some issues with the rigidity of the arms and body movements. The sharp darting motion of the eyes is nice and adds a lot of characterisation. Some of the movements of the arms and head were quite well timed with anticipation and thought coming through in the way that the character moves his hand at the 8 second mark and opens his fingers before he closes them again in the finger interlocking shot which establishes further, the mindset of the character. The target audience of this animation is probably people who already know the Nightcrawler character and in looking at this, maybe the people who don't know the character may not fully understand the relation of Nightcrawler to the animation. 
   
             The overall render itself is of quite a high quality with the lighting looking nice and shadows being cast in a way that it looks like sharp interior lighting. It was darker during the first render but after taking the sampling up and manipulating the grade in nuke, i was able to get the desired effect. The chrome mia material that was used to create the reflective mirror texture also came out believable although slightly darker than I had hoped. The rotation of the in scene camera runs smoothly in this animation but could possibly be a little bit slower.

    Looking at the secondary action on the tail, it is smooth but maybe moves a bit too much in comparison to the rest of the body. When animating, I tried to make the tail move and react to the movements that the rest of the body was making and trying to make it react to the words and emotions of the character. This actually worked well and although the movements are subtle, convey and mimic how the character's thoughts are shown. As for the movements of the head, I tried to make the movements less literal by offsetting them, as per the lecturer's request. By doing this it added asymmetry and a sense of realistic imperfection to the character.

     Again to talk about the mouth and facial expressions, the scowling nature of the character works well with the quote, his eyebrows lowering and raising at certain points of excitement in the character's voice. The animation as a whole has definitely been successful with some slight issues that I will learn from. This has been my first attempt at creating blendshapes for facial animation and so, it was quite an enjoyable and interesting process to create emotion through these facial features and lip sync it to the Taken quote, allowing for a new approach to the famous action scene.