Christmas was coming and so were my exams. One of them being a Christmas themed character animation.

This animation needed to have both body movement and facial animation. The second was new subject during the semester, having already made several emotion and lip sync assignments. Now, it all had to come together.

After storyboarding an idea, I had to make the reference. Especially this academic year, I became a big fan of recording reference myself. I recorded a voice sample and used this to act out to. Then, I shot both a lip sync video and a body movement video. The problem with my reference was that I am a male and the rig I used was female. My character ended up being to masculine. Therefore, I had to ask one of my female classmates to make new reference. This ended up with my character having a more feminine run and standing pose.

Throughout the semester, my lip sync and facial expression skills got improved. I was happy to finally showcase this in the exam. Body movement was often still a problem, as timing and weight were not applied correctly. After multiple revisions, I had a good looking animation and I thankfully passed for the exam.

Modeled by Dmitry Danilov

Rigged by Boris Klimov