For my Innovations project I decided that I wanted to do a detailed study of animation. In the past I have looked at human animation, but have not ever done any animal animation. I therefore wanted to study something that was unlike anything I had looked at before. I did not want to animate anything that had been animated realistically many times before, such as a feline or even a dinosaur. 

I decided that a polar bear was an ideal thing to study, as although there have been famous animations of them in both two and three dimensions, they have usually been used as a cute and cuddly image to sell something as in the case of the Coca Cola ads. I wanted my animation to be a real interpretation of the way an actual polar bear might go about its daily business. 

Being as my project was to be a study into the movement of the bear rather than anything else, I decided that using a block model to represent the bear rather than an anatomically correct skinned model would be most appropriate. I wanted the blocks to be parented to the skeleton of the bear rather than bound, so that deformation would not be an issue and I could therefore get on with the animation.

I wanted the movement of the bear I animated to be backed up with video evidence, so that I was not guessing how the bear might go about moving, but studying what the bear actually does with its body. This meant that before I could decide what to animate the bear doing, I would have to look at what evidence I had for a particular action and base my sequences around that. I did not want the actions to be an exact 'rotoscoped' copy of the video evidence, however, as I wanted my bear to take on its own personality.

Making the Model

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