Okaaayyy, I know its a little early to be jumping right into the animation pond but I just really wanted to get a good idea of how to animate laughter. Plus, it also put me in a good mood. Drawing out the sheer joy that a good joke brings on is a perfect source of serotonin.
I didn’t really focus too much on making it pretty -w-;; so it looks pretty rough (rougher than the actual rough gif).
And seeing as I had learned about camera tracking prior, I thought to maybe test it out with this gif. The tracking worked and also didn’t work… but it IS a test so ‘yay experimentation!’
So we got three little moodies over here \(^w^)/ The one that was probably the most fun to assemble was Orion’s general concept. Looking for pictures of laughing people just put me in a good mood overall and the dark humour was something I could relate too seeing as I also got the jokes.
Laughter is joyful overall, so I wanted a half warm half edgy looking moodboard for him.
After that was the fashion. Despite looking quite feminine, Orion is supposed to be androgynous. He has an appreciation for both masculine and feminine clothing… soooo you can see him in a floofy dress one day and stacked up like a rapper the next. It really depends on his mood. Regardless of what he wears, he could be dressed in all black like an undertaker, he’ll still wear his classic bubbly grin plastered on his face.
Anyway, next up is the ‘behind the smile’ moodboard. I see a lot of quotes going on about those who have the biggest smiles secretly suffering inside. In some cases, that’s true, in others… well I just don’t trust people that are TOO nice. That aside, Orion is one of those who suffers for his own happiness. Despite his habit, it doesn’t define him, so when his ‘friends’ call him out as being a ‘dark person’ or capitalise on how weird he is (Something I heard a lot in my childhood), he starts to question himself. This constant judgment has essentially sent him into an identity crisis and self hatred spiral that only shows up the moment he returns to his dorms- away from the public. Next to that, he’s tired. Mentally exhausted for constantly having to explain himself and not get somebody to just defend him for once. Even though he has friends, they make no effort to really know him on the inside, so as far as they’re concerned, they could believe that Orion is secretly a sadistic maniac.
So yeah. That’s a little bit more of an in depth look at what the moodboards are meant to show.
This was my first series of development sketches. ‘The boy who laughs at the wrong times’- as much as it explains a lot about my protagonist, it doesn’t really tell the audience what the ‘wrong time’ is, so I made these to give a little more of inkling towards what Orion’s humour is like with him reacting to these jokes.
The jokes themselves are screenshots from the r/cursedcomments subreddit on reddit which features plenty of edgy, offensive and dark humour in its submissions. Whereas Orion’s reactions are parodies of viral reaction images used throughout the meme community.
So I’m just about finished with my ‘XMAS’ padlet work. I’d like to treat it much like a pack of work as well as ongoing development, but I really want to look at what I’ve done thus far as my first steps into my project. Prior to this, testing testing was merely experimentation. THIS is where the idea was born and personally it holds a lot of significance to my sentimental hermit self.
Come tomorrow, I’ll be presenting my Padlet board. I will explain each part of the board in more detail on here after I’m given feedback because I plan to include all the feedback I’ve gotten on the whole (in a separate blog post.)
