It is a wise choice to look for inspiration from movies or animations, but sometimes it is hard to find references that exactly match what animators want, so animators might choose to shoot their own. Recording video is a common tool in the industry because it allows animators to quickly grasp the dynamics and movements of the character, and design performances based on observing the movement details and facial expressions of professional actors.

For example, “Love Death + Robots – Jibaro” used real-life references to make the animation. Choreographer Sara Silkin shared some videos on social media that shed some light on the production process behind the work. We can see that movement artist Megan Goldstein’s outstanding dance is very similar to the final animation; we can even say this reference is one of the most important things for the episode’s production.

As an animation student, it is difficult to hire professional actors to shoot and design movements for creation due to the limited budget. Usually, we have to complete all the steps ourselves, but sometimes the results are certainly not as perfect as those in the industry.

Fortunately, this course has arranged performance classes and hired professional staff to assist us in filming. With the advice of professional staff, we got many useful reference videos. The cooperation between classmates really helped me a lot, since I feel embarrassed in front of the camera, most of my tasks were to confirm that all the layouts were correct and give timely feedback when filming.

In the following paragraph, I will illustrate how I use these reference videos when I am creating animations. In addition, I will display the behind of the entire production workflow and what I am considering in this process, and summarise the experience in the end.

This shot shows the girl falling forward due to fear and shock after noticing the change in the poster. In fact, I also tried to search for references on the Internet at the beginning, but I found it difficult to find videos with the same angle as my animation.

We decided to film this movement ourselves in the room as a reference. The actress who was recorded was the director of the graduation film because she understood the emotion and entire movement of this girl in this shot.

In this first version of rough animation, the character’s body shape does not match the character design. At this stage, I almost copied the reference video to catch the correct relation with space and character position.

Then, I corrected the character’s body shape and adjusted the timing after discussing with the director.

In conclusion, I think filming videos can make the production process faster and smoother, but I still faced some issues when I used these references. I realised that if your character’s body shape does not look like the people in the real world (I mean very stylised and exaggerated ), you need to modify a lot to correct the character’s body shape.

For my reflection, I think I can do better in this process to save time. I should only copy the keyframe from the references and then add the in-between frames after modifying the character’s body shape.