I am pleased with the final sequences I produced at the end of this project. I wanted to reproduce the movement as accurately as my model would allow, and I think I achieved this.
I wanted to make the animation as realistic as possible to get away from the usual cuddly caricatured animation associated with polar bears, and by following the real footage as closely as possible, I think I managed this. My bear does have a certain docile element to its character, but I think it also comes across as thinking about its actions. For my bear to show intelligence without talking or performing any personified actions is something that I am quite happy to have incorporated in my final piece. Polar bears have a natural 'cute' quality to their movement, so it would be difficult to echo their movements without capturing an element of this. 

There was not a great deal of difference between the two sequences I animated, in terms of the actual tasks the bears perform. Although the leaping of the hunting sequence differs vastly from the first, the lead up to that moment does not appear to be all that different. In animating terms, the slower creeping movement contrasted with the much faster walking, but to make the sequences more interesting to the viewer, there could have been more of the leaping at the end of the hunting piece, or there could have been more sequences.

Although my model achieved most of what I asked of it, there were a few time when I was unable to recreate the actions of the bear as they would have occurred in reality, and so had to adapt my sequences to compensate. Getting the bear to bend its back around more when it was stooping during the first animation would have meant that I would have been able to get the bear to walk off at the end as I had originally planned. Simply adding more blocks to the back of the bear would probably have fixed this. Making the bear rest back into itself to make the sitting position in the hunting animation more realistic would be more difficult to solve. I could have changed each of the joints individually, but I could have easily irreversibly changed my model and so ruined my whole animation, so I decided to stay with the slightly unnatural position. With a higher resolution model, this would not be so easy to get around, however, the model would have the same problem but be unable to conceal it with a blocky model.

I would have liked to have made more adult sequences, and also looked at the cub comparisons with the adult movement, and I think this a way that my project could be extended in the future. Another project could look at animating a higher resolution model. My project covers the basic movement of the bear, but a more detailed study could look at the way the joints of the bear deform against one another, as well as the movement of those joints.

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