The action is the character going from a standing position to drawing his weapon and being in a fighting stance. Before I went into this animation I looked up a video of a man unsheathing a samurai sword and went through it frame by frame to identify the storytelling key poses and I thumb nailed them on paper, this was helpful because I found nuances I wouldn't have thought of otherwise, like the small twist of the hand on the handle before he pulls the sword, or the position directly afterwards. Once I had some rough thumbnails I sketched how different parts of the body would move more specifically, like the arms moving the sword around so it's facing forward or how the legs drop into a crouching stance.
This was a useful exercise to do in preparation for this animation as it informed the movement and meant I wasn't going in blind, I also did some characters sketches in preparation so I would understand the anatomy of the character.
Obviously at the moment this is quite rough, it's mostly inbetweened but clearly missing some, I may take this further and clean it up but generally this was just a practice and I think I achieved what I set out to do, figured out a more informed process to creating real feeling animation.
I also focused on the timing as I think one of my weaknesses as an animator is having uniform timing creating boring movement, I think this animation has more interesting timing that gives it more of a sense of weight then maybe some of my older animation.
I think the character animation in this piece is quite weak however, it doesn't communicate much intent or emotion which could perhaps be improved with the facial animation, which took a backseat to the primary movement in this test.
