Acting/Interaction assignment 1

First assignment from teacher Fabian Erlinghauser (whose work I know from Secret of Kells, just off the top of my head. he animated the scene we had to inbetween earlier, btw).

We had to animate two characters hugging (story is that they haven't seen each other in a long time). It was very important that there was a size difference and that both characters' faces could be seen, so we had to take that into account with our staging. Time frame was rather loose, anything from 75 to 125 frames...
The characters were Hogarth from the Iron Giant and either the Sultan (a taller version because we had to upgrade him to Santa-size, haha) from Aladdin or Kala from Tarzan. I chose Kala because her model was more challenging and I'd been walking the easy street with the last character assignment.

First some thumbnails...

 At least I can draw gorillas now...

The 3 story-telling keys were the most important (as they always are, really) and needed the most on-model focus; all the other keys were just meant to be rough, loose sketches.

Some of my early action looked like this:

But here's what I finally came up with and settled for:

The release and last looking at each other frame was added at the very last minute of the process. I felt that the scene didn't breathe at the end without it.