Final editing

I rendered the animation along with the soundtrack but wanted to add some snoring sounds to the start. To do this I attempted to open the file in Adobe Premiere Pro but it reported a generic fault. There was also a fast nod of the jelly baby's head at the start of the animation, however on checking the animation through the timeline in 3DS max I could note no anomalies.

How does this character relate to its viewers?

This character links well to the younger audience by providing simple easy to follow dance moves and as such creating a fun way to exercise. The character also sings some phonics in the song, which would be a great way in which children could learn; especially if the phonic word should be placed on the screen at the same time as the singing of them enabling the child to interact with auditory and visual stimuli.

Traditionally there are 6 jelly babies, each of a differerent colour. This means that a complete unit could be made up each with a different personality type and ways of interacting with each other, thereby showing different dynamics.

Finishing touches

I added a blink cycle and a wink to the jelly baby as it looked odd to have the eyes open constantly. On reviewing the animation I noticed that in a few places the arms became completely twisted around so some further keyframes were added to compensate for this. I also checked that the eyes were looking in the right direction and carried out some minor adjustmemts in places. As the animtion is to only be 30-60 seconds in length, but the song goes on for over 3 mins I had to choose a point in which to stop. The ideal time seemed to be at the words "...light it up like it's dynamite..." where it would be possible to create a fireworks display or similar.  For the purpose of this assignment I have not carried out this procedure as I felt it was superfluous to the personaltity of the character and would just be background noise.

To arms

I thought the arms did not move very well at the shoulders. I believe this was more due to the fact that the jelly baby was quite big from the front to the back then the set up of the envelopes. Ideally I should have made the join at the shoulders narrower therby allowing more room for movement.

Background information

I thought it would be appropriate to pay attention to the words of the song and have the jelly baby move accordingly. A storyboard was drawn out to help visualise these movemens and to provide a gudieline for the animation.

Synchronising moves

Having rigged the jelly baby with the bones system and edited the envelopes to control the movement of each individual part howeverI still wanted the character to be fairly bendy but not overly so. I thought the gummy bears might give some insight as these too were originaly jelly type sweets. However a search on youtube revealed a 2D cartoon http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loUNoy0Qub0 and a 3D character whose movements were much too rigid and fast for my purposes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=astISOttCQ0 (and actually quite frightening to watch). To help find the sort of movement I wanted from the character I searched BBC iPlayer for current children's animations. I came across "Charley Bear" http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/search?q=little%20charley%20bear, whose movements I thought emulated the type of thing I wanted from the jelly baby character. As a soft toy I felt his movement were fluid without going to excess. I even bought a pack of jelly babies to test out their consistency.

Mouth issues

I decided to try and redress the problems I was having with the mouth and the morpher modifier. I made a copy of the torus (mouth) and it's attached FFD box then altered the shape using an image of the phoneme A on a background plane. A morpher modifier was then added to the original torus and FFD box however the previous problem was still encountered. On scrubbimg the playhead I noticed that the copied torus and FFD box moved along with the head so I opened up the schematic view where I severed the link to the head but this did not solve the morpher problem.



Eventually to have the jelly baby character sing along to parts of the song I used keyframes to manipulate the movement of the mouth using the FFD box control points. I still used the phoneme shapes given to match up the mouth movement and shape to the sounds. I zoomed into the timeline so as to marry the two up as accurately as possible. The most difficult aspect was lining up the transition of the mouth movement between each sound.

I still had difficulties with altering the mouth shape to fit in the mouth hole created on the head of the main body.  Even though I tried to match the two up carefully I was not always successful. In future I would prefer to create the mouth as part of the body and use the morpher modifier to animate the character as a whole.