Before animating, I spent time observing how birds move while walking through the park. One key thing I noticed was how their head moves independently and often leads the body movement, which became a major focus in this animation.

To achieve this, I relied heavily on IK for the head animation, using locators to give me better control and flexibility over the head movement. During the stepped blocking stage, I briefly used FK to establish clean poses before transferring the keys to IK for refinement and polish.

Along the way, I also adjusted parts of the story beats to strengthen the animation. These changes included adding a fly cycle at the beginning, a quick flap when the bird jumps toward the camera, and adding more variation in timing to keep the motion from feeling too linear.

Overall, this was a really fun piece to animate and a great learning experience!