Shot Breakdown

In this post I'd like to breakdown my process, from conceptual sketches to final render, for a shot that I animated for Ember, the animated short film that I worked on.
When I animate, it helps me to sketch out on paper the basic idea of what the poses and actions in the animation will be.

I usually get these sketches from reference video that I find, or that I record myself.  From the sketches and reference video, I started blocking out the key poses in Maya.  Here is what I originally had as my blocking poses with the reference video in the upper corner (the reference video will seem kind of fast since I had to speed it up to match the length of the playblast).

You'll notice I have reference video of myself and of one of my classmates, this is because I noticed my movements may be a little too "girly" so I figured I should have reference of a guy doing the action as well.  From here, a point in the story changed from where the man was not asleep at the the beginning anymore and was instead recovering from getting hit by a blast of wind, so that had to change in my next iteration.  Also, I added a few more poses, added some weight to the existing ones and worked with the fingers a little more.

From this iteration I wasn't really liking how the movement of the man turning over was looking so I had shot some more reference and corrected the poses so there was more realistic looking weight and it didn't looking like he was squatting the whole time.  I also took out the part at the beginning where he looked to his left to allow more time that was needed for the rest of the shot.  In this next iteration, I started smoothing out the animation and I added to the shot the fact that he should be looking at his hut the whole time, since his house is actually on fire in this shot, with less extreme head movements.

Now this iteration had some issues where the knee was popping for some reason and the head was popping when I was changing it from it's default to having it following the head aim.  The animation still needed to be smoothed out more to get rid of the hard hits that were happening in some areas and there needed to be more of a smoother weight distribution throughout the shot.  I also worked with the facial animation in this next animation, as well as fixed most of the above mentioned issues with the last iteration.

One of the largest issues we realized from this iteration, in one of our dailies meetings, was that his left leg wasn't really behaving like how your leg would if you were jumping to the side like he is.  He needed to have his left foot planted longer before jumping to look less like he was popping out of the pose, also, his leg needing to follow the momentum of the movement more when when he was jumping to look more realistic.  The angle at which he lands when he does that slight jump also needed to be corrected since I had him rotated a little too upright and had him faced too much towards the hut.  Also, to allot more time for finessing the weight issues that I was still having, the landing of the final step in his run was taken out.  Furthermore, in this final pass, I added more overlapping action in his arms and fingers for more appeal.

For the final render, I had to adjust his hands to account for the nCloth simulation that was added to the animation for the lower half of his tunic, although there are still some minor issues with the nCloth going through the geometry.  Here's the final render!