Mime Spider

This is my Knight Spider animation, my aim was to present the actions of a mime through the spider and give it personality - you may even call him Mime Spider. I really wanted to get the poses to be very mime like and tell a story, as the art of mime does.

I had some trouble trying to get my vision right, I had seen many mimes but I wanted to imbue the way mimes originally moved and interacted with their surroundings. All the storyboards are similar, yet as I explored a more cohesive story, the final storyboard makes the most sense.

One of the main inspirations for my work was the world famous Mime artist Marcel Marceau. As the contest does not allow sound, I felt a mime would be perfect for the Knight Spider and since Marceau refers to mime as 'the art of silence', he was the best inspiration for my project.

I started with my walk cycle, making sure that the rig moved the way I envisioned.

While animating the walk cycle I had some difficulty with the feet, when I wanted to move the foot in a more natural pose (top left picture to the right) it began to pop at the knee and when I went back to the first frame it changed the original pose (bottom picture left) to an abnormal pose (bottom picture right). 

I had finished the walk cycle adding the arm movements, really focusing on the bounce of the body, next was to start miming.

At this part of my project I was getting comfortable with the rig and started to enjoy the animation process, the inspiration for the 'Mime Spiders' pose (before he pushes the box) came from the mime from Tangled the film from Disney.

I really wanted to explore the rig and so I started to experiment with poses.

The poses that were chosen were inspired by a short animation by Kate Namowicz and Skyler Porras. I really tried to use as many controls and experiment as much as I could with the poses, I really enjoyed adding this to my animation.

Once the poses were done, I was able to concentrate on the ending and incorporate the Marcel Marceau inspired actions.

This is my final animation of 'Mime spider'