Animation is the process of bringing characters and environments to life through movement and action. Because there is no dialogue in Shakti, the story is told through the characters’ body language and facial expression. For this project, the animation team paid specific attention to the intricacies of each characters’ movement.

 

In order to make sure that Ahani’s movements were hesitant and childlike, we studied other instances of animated children such as Boo from Monster’s Inc.  and Baby Moana from Moana. Of course, since these characters don’t perform the same movements as Ahani, we filmed our own reference for Ahani’s specific action: (2000_0050 reference)

 

While it was important for us to follow our references closely in order to achieve a more lifelike movement for the characters, sometimes the limitations of a scene or the context of the story necessitated changes during animation: (1000_0140 reference vs. scene video)

 

In addition to filming reference, we also sketched thumbnails of the movement in preparation for actually animating the scene. These thumbnails help us plan the key storytelling poses of the animation and better help us transfer the movements of the adult acting out the reference onto the child model: