Animation Stages: Darlin

Animating Darlin for Everyone's Hero was an interesting challenge. Even though we were already delving pretty far into the cartoony side of things considering that she had a face and could talk, one of the directions we were given was to avoid bending her "body" too much. That meant that the performance had to be carried largely by the bat's overall movement combined with her facial expressions. Some subtle bending was allowed, though, so that made the work a little easier. On top of that, her facial rig was very elaborate, allowing for a lot of subtle control over her expression.

In planning my shots, I like to act out stuff in front of a camera. Because Darlin is essentially just an elongated head, I was able to do this sitting at my desk. I looped the audio and recorded 15-20 takes, then analyzed the results and picked out the acting choices that I felt worked best. From there, I was ready to start blocking poses. (BTW...the background music is a temp track from the animatic, not the final film soundtrack.)

	Key poses The first step was to establish the core poses that would serve as the basis for the rest of the motion. I wanted to pick as few poses as possible so that the base motion wouldn't feel too busy after adding detail.

	Body breakdowns, part 1 The core poses were approved, but I was told that there was a little too much bend in the bat, so I pulled back on the bend and moved right into builing breakdowns. This pass shows partial completion of the breakdowns for the body. I had recently re-discovered my old tweenMachine tool (version 1), so I reacquainted myself with it in this stage.

	Body breakdowns, part 2 After a couple more passes, I had the breakdowns finished for the body. I was deviating a little from my normal workflow, though, in that I hadn't done anything with the face except work with the eye direction. Often I'll block in key facial poses along with the body motion, but in this case I decided to focus on one piece at a time.

	Facial blocking A couple passes later, I had blocked in the facial animation. I used the tweenMachine during this phase as well, which helped me get the facial transitions working well with the body. Facial animation is one of my favorite steps, and I really tried to hone in on the subtle emotional cues from Whoopi Goldberg's delivery.

	Final animation Here's the final render that went into the film. Because I had put so much detail into blocking, the polish phase went fairly quickly.

	Stage comparison Here's a clip that shows all four major stages together: key poses, body bocking, face blocking, and final polish. You'll probably notice that the lip sync timing in the face blocking step doesn't exactly match the final polish pass. That's because the face shapes were created to match the timing of the existing body blocking. When it came time to polish, all those timing differences were resolved fairly easily. It's also interesting to note that the final render has the camera closer to Darlin than when I animated it.