One of the most time-consuming stages of this animation was finding suitable audio. I spent several days searching for the right clip that I felt would work well for this performance. Once I had chosen the audio, I recorded video references of my own acting and combined several takes to better understand and refine the movement.

Initially, I wanted to challenge myself by animating the character’s hand sliding down through the hair. However, this idea was later scrapped, as the rig did not have hair controllers available to support this action.

After gathering the references, I started by animating the overall body movement. The goal was to make sure the body language conveyed the same emotion as the audio, even when muted. Once the body animation was established, I moved on to the facial expressions and lip-sync pass. In the final stage, I did another expression pass, adding micro details such as subtle movements in the cheeks, chin, and nose, as well as squash and stretch across the face. Although these details are small, they really help bring the animation to another level.