Aang Acts Out of Character

Hi! My name is Brendan Harmon and I am currently in college and will soon start my sophomore year. I found a clip from The Equalizer 2 and thought it was really cool and wanted to find a character to use, and I found Aang and just kind of went with it.

I used an Aang rig that I found on animationmethods.com. I ended up animating this in Maya. I also found this clip from the Equalizer 2: https://youtu.be/-BgZFaMJRxM?t=116. I also used other movies as reference and inspiration for the movement of Aang in the animation.

Whenever I start using a new rig I mess with the various controls of it just to get a feel of how it works and moves and all that. Doing this helps me set up my plan on how I am going to animate it. If there is sound in the animation I will import the audio first.

It mostly depends on if a character is going to be moving from point A to point B, but for this animation Aang never moves like that so I never touched the big circle control under his feet. But when I do start my animations I usually go for the hip control that moves every part of the body above that control then work my way up. I also make sure to set up the camera and everything to get it right.

Now that I have it set up and I know what I want, it becomes time to do the animation itself. Most people set up key poses when they get started on an animation, but what I do when I animate is I go one body part at a time for a certain time frame (let's say 80 frames of animation). For each body part I make keyframes on specific moments to figure out the timing of what I am trying to do, and then I add more keyframes in between these moments to really help make it flow.

(animation without face animation below)

I animate the face by starting with the movement of the jaw itself and timing it with the sound file. Most of the time while doing this I will say the lines themselves and feel how my own mouth is moving and find out how to animate it that way. Afterwards I animate the eyebrows and eyes/eyelids to form his expressions a little more.

And here is my animation after like 2 months of work!